UppLYSning Lysator Seminar Series

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

Time and place: Monday 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/

[1478]