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by stevan
2242 days ago
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One part that interests me is the discussion about simulation testing in "4.3.3.
FEEDBACK THROUGH MONITORING AND SIMULATION" (p. 31 in the PDF). Alan Perlis says: "I'd like to read three sentences to close this issue.
1. A software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with
the designing instead of being used after the design.
2. A simulation which matches the requirements contains the control which
organizes the design of the system.
3. Through successive repetitions of this process of interlaced testing and
design the model ultimately becomes the software system itself. I think
that it is the key of the approach that has been suggested, that there is
no such question as testing things after the fact with simulation models,
but that in effect the testing and the replacement of simulations with
modules that are deeper and more detailed goes on with the simulation
model controlling, as it were, the place and order in which these things
are done."
What happened to that technique? I tried to look at the papers that cite Brian
Randell's "Towards a methodology of computer systems design" paper, which is the
basis for the discussion (and which you can find later in the same PDF), but
couldn't really find more than a couple of papers and they didn't go so deep
into the details.It seems that simulation testing only recently resurfaced with Will Wilson's
2014 Strange Loop talk about how FoundationDB is tested. In fact they seems to
have done exactly what Alan Perlis said in 1968, but they never mention any
source of inspiration/prior work. Was the technique independently rediscovered,
or had they in fact read the (in)famous 1968 NATO software engineering report? |
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