Fourteen years of software engineering at ETH Zurich Bertrand Meyer Politecnico di Milano and Innopolis University
[email protected] Aug. 2017; typo cor- rections, Dec. 2017. Abstract A Chair of Software Engineering existed at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, from 1 October 2001 to 31 January 2016, under my leadership. Our work, summarized here, covered a wide range of theoretical and practical topics, with object technology in the Eiffel method as the unifying thread1. Overview Computer science (“Informatik”) has a brilliant past at ETH Zurich, most notori- ously illustrated by Niklaus Wirth; but there has not traditionally been, nor is there now, a group or professorship with the name “software engineering”. The Chair of Software Engineering existed from 1 October 2001, when I was appointed on Wirth’s former position with the title of Professor of Software Engineering, until 31 January 2016. Our slogan, covering both the products and processes of software, was “help the world produce better software and produce software better”. This chapter is an account of what the Chair did towards this goal. It is divided into the following sections: 1. Basic data. 2. Conferences, journals, summer school and other outreach. 3. Courses taught. 4. Principle and experience of teaching programming. 5. Pedagogical tools and MOOCs. 6. Methods and tools for distributed software development. 7. Language development and standardization. 8. Software process and methodology, requirements analysis, agile methods. 9. Object persistence. 10. Verification: proofs, tests, automatic bug correction. 11. Concurrent programming. 12. Software for robotics. 13. Assessment. While this order of sections facilitates the presentation it requires some patience from the reader, since the topics that accounted for most of the chair’s attention, resources and scientific results appear from section 10 on.