UppLYSning 29/11: Forensic Software Engineering: using the mistakes of the past to avoid the mistakes of the future

[Kent Engström]

29/11: Forensic Software Engineering: using the mistakes of the past to avoid
       the mistakes of the future

  With Professor Les Hatton, University of Kingston, UK

  Please note the day (different) and place (normal): Monday (not
  Tuesday), November 29, 18:15 in Visionen, House B, Campus Valla.


   We live in a world increasingly dominated by software of generally
   poor quality.  Forensic Software Engineering is an engineering
   discipline.  Using data and empirical methods, it seeks to extract
   lessons from failures in Software Process, Software Product and
   Software Environment.  These lessons are used to help prevent
   future occurrences of the same failures. Security issues are
   included as just another form of system failure.

   This talk gives a brief introduction to Forensic Software
   Engineering and its hopes for the future.  It uses lots of examples
   from real systems demonstrating that we do indeed have a long way
   to go yet.

   Les Hatton is a director of Oakwood Computing Associates and holds
   the Chair of Forensic Software Engineering at the University of
   Kingston, U.K.  He holds a B.A. (1970) from King's College,
   Cambridge, an M.Sc.  (1971) and Ph.D.  (1973) from the University
   of Manchester, all in mathematics; an A.L.C.M. (1980) in guitar
   from the London College of Music, and an LL.M.  in IT law from the
   University of Strathclyde (1999). He received a number of
   international prizes for geophysics in the 1970s and '80s
   culminating in the 1987 Conrad Schlumberger prize for his work in
   computational geophysics.

   He later became interested in software reliability and began to
   research the design and implementation of high-integrity and
   safety-critical systems.  He has published many technical papers
   and his 1995 book 'Safer C' pioneered the use of safer language
   subsets in embedded control systems and influenced many later
   standards including the automotive industry's widely-used MISRA-C
   standard.  He has designed and implemented numerous successful
   commercial software systems and screwed up a few others. :-) He has
   been voted amongst the world's leading scholars of systems and
   software engineering 3 times in the last 5 years by the US Journal
   of Systems and Software.

   An extensive bibliography is available at http://www.leshatton.org/