Mark Staples Blog

What Software Engineers Should Know
Mon, 14 Nov 2011 02:01:19 +0000
Software Engineering would be a more mature discipline if we had spent more time reading What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History rather than A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Be Sociable, Share! Tweet

Congratulations Marek and Innoboard Team!
Fri, 23 Sep 2011 00:55:26 +0000
Marek Kowalkiewicz from the SAP Research in Brisbane just last week won the international “Demo Jam” competition in the SAP TechEd event in LA, for the “Innoboard” software.  Innoboard is an augmented reality technology, which lets distributed teams interactively share whiteboards that mix projected images and physical sticky post-it notes.  All using the low-cost iphone [...]

Is Informatics a Science?
Thu, 21 Jul 2011 02:17:50 +0000
Robin Milner gave a presentation “Is Informatics a Science?” at a conference at ENS, 10 December 2007, where he discussed the challenge of better understanding relationships between models in computer science – how they “explain” (specify, refine, implement, abstract, realise) each other. I don’t believe he captured these thoughts in a journal or conference paper, [...]

What is Software Architecture?
Tue, 03 May 2011 02:22:26 +0000
What is software architecture? There have been many definitions. Here’s mine. First let’s consider some of the earlier definitions. SEI has a huge collection of definitions on its website, including “classic” definitions, bibliographic definitions (stops in 1996?), “modern” definitions, and definitions submitted from the community.  Perry and Wolf (1992) have perhaps the most classic definition, [...]

Invention vs Innovation
Tue, 11 May 2010 03:32:30 +0000
Just heard in a QESP webinar on Software Innovation in Australia from Julian Day of the Australia Consensus Awards: In business, invention is the conversion of cash into ideas, but innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. Nice.  I see this is also on wikipedia.  I wonder what’s the original source for this quote? [...]

Reference Management
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 23:07:14 +0000
Researchers “stand on the shoulders of giants“, which in practice means reading a lot of academic papers and reports.  Lots.  You not only want to read them, but also cite them in papers you write, search them, and organise them by whatever topics you’re investigating.  How do you do that? When I was a PhD [...]

Breaking the Fractal V Lifecycle?
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:31:32 +0000
Liming has raised three points in reference to my Fractal V Lifecycle.  His questions are probing the limits of the model in interesting ways. Before I discuss them, I’d like to introduce a concept and some terminology from an earlier paper I wrote. The V model can accommodate as many levels of design abstraction as [...]

Fractal V Lifecycle for Pre-Project Activities
Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:33:14 +0000
Louis has got a new article version of my earlier blog post on the Fractal V Lifecycle up on alinement.net magazine/community website. He’s also added some thoughts of his own on extending the concept into pre-project activities.  For these sorts of activities I tend to favor putting them on top, i.e. on the left but [...]

Academic Academy Awards
Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:48:16 +0000
I had to laugh at Liming’s latest micro-blog posting, Why are papers in top conferences very boring (these days)? It’s funny, but I’m not sure I entirely agree – I think top conferences do have interesting papers.  Liming is saying interesting ideas won’t necessarily have had time to be well validated, and by the time [...]

Developing Whole Verified Embedded Systems
Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:41:14 +0000
NICTA’s recent Techfest in Sydney saw a flurry of news around the announcement of a significant research achievement- the formal verification of the seL4 microkernel. The team developed a mathematical proof of the functional correctness of the microkernel down to the level of the C source code. The achievement is important for two reasons. Firstly, [...]