Introductory Readings and Writeups for students working with Dr. Cheng

• High Assurance Software:

  • Therac Article (Leveson and Clark)
  • Ariane 5 Missile Accident

    • Question: Who is to blame for the accidents?
    • Write a 1-2 page critique summarizing the paper and answering the question.

  • Formal Methods: State of the Art and Future Directions, E.M. Clarke and J.M. Wing
  • Seven More Myths on Formal Methods, J.P. Bowen and M. Hinchey
    • Question: What are the advantages and the disadvantages to FM? How can we overcome the disadvantages, while leveraging the advantages?
    • Write a 1-2 page critique summarizing the paper and answering the questions.

     

  • A. Avizienis, J.-C. Laprie and B. Randell. Fundamental Concepts of Dependability, Research Report N01145, LAAS-CNRS, April 2001. (citeseer, local)
    • Question: What aspects of dependability have you dealt with in software development? How have you tried to ensure dependability in software that you've developed? 
    • Write a 1-2 page critique summarizing the paper and answering the questions.

• Object-Oriented Design and Reuse:

  • Design Patterns (original paper): Gamma et al
  • Designing Reusable Classes (original frameworks paper): Johnson and Foote (new 2/26/01)
    • Question: How have you used OOD and/or OOP to take advantage of reuse?  What do you think are the challenges to using patterns? What do you think are the challenges to design and code reuse?
    • Write a 1-2 page critique summarizing the paper and answering the questions.

     

• Adaptive Software:

  • M. Shaw. 'Self-Healing': Softening Precision to Avoid Brittleness. Proceedings of the First ACM SIGSOFT Workshop on Self-Healing Systems (WOSS '02). Charleston, South Carolina, November 2002, pp.111-113.
  • Koopman, P. Elements of the self-healing system problem space. Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS03), May 2003.
  • A. G. Ganek and T. A. Corbi. The dawning of the autonomic computing era.IBM Systems Journal, Special Issue on Autonomic Computing.Vol 42, No 1, 2003.
    • Question: What are the major development issues when adapting software dynamically? What are the major "correctness" issues when adaptive software dynamically?
    • Write a 1-2 page critique summarizing the paper and answering the questions.

Administrative Information:

• Weekly Status Reports: All students need to turn in weekly status reports. Here is the ASCII template (here). The status reports are due by 9:00 p.m. the night before our regularly scheduled meeting. (Here is a version of the status report in Latex in case you need to learn Latex -- the word processing language that I use for writing all of my papers.)

• Word processing: All students working with me will need to learn Latex, the word processing utility. There are many references for latex. Below are a sampling:
  • Latex Handout (from CSE470) (overview, intro, essentials, gentle guide, sample files, etc.)
  • (La)TeX Navigator (A searchable encyclopedia of information about LaTeX and TeX)
  • Latex for the PC (requires 40 MB)
  • Ghostview previewer for PC