Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering: The Legacy of Victor R. Basili

This book captures the main scientific contributions of Victor R. Basili, who has significantly shaped the field of empirical software engineering from its very start. He was the first to claim that software engineering needed to follow the model of other physical sciences and develop an experimental paradigm. By working on this postulate, he developed concepts that today are well known and widely used, including the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement paradigm, and the Experience Factory. He is one of the few software pioneers who can aver that their research results are not just scientifically acclaimed but are also used as industry standards. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, celebrated with a symposium in his honor at the International Conference on Software Engineering in St. Louis, MO, USA in May 2005, Barry Boehm, Hans Dieter Rombach, and Marvin V. Zelkowitz, each a long-time collaborator of Victor R. Basili, selected the 20 most important research papers of their friend, and arranged these according to subject field. They then invited renowned researchers to write topical introductions. The result is this commented collection of timeless cornerstones of software engineering, hitherto available only in scattered publications

Production of optimised machine-code for high-level languages using machine-independent intermediate codes

The aim of this work was to investigate the problems associated with using machine-independent intermediate codes in the translation from a high-level language into machine code, with emphasis on minimising code size and providing good run-time diagnostic capabilities. The main result was a machine-independent intermediate code, I-code, which has been used successfully to develop optimising and diagnostic compilers for the IMP77 language on a large number of different computer systems. In addition, the work has been used to lay the foundations for a project to develop an intermediate code for portable SIMULA compilers. The major conclusions of the research were that carefully designed machine-independent intermediate codes can be used to generate viable optimising and diagnostic compilers, and that the commonality introduced into different code generators processing the code for different machines simplifies the tasks of creating new compilers and maintaining old ones