an entry from

Piotr's R&D blog

This is the most influential paper award presentation. Michael Jackson (from the panel) is rehashing some of the same points re: normal vs. radical design. From what I understood, normal design is based on experience and doesn't deviate too far from things that have been tried and are known to work. Radical design tries to build something new, based on theory or formal models. The best that should be expected of a radical design is that it not be completely broken, and provide the motivation for further design work. I guess that software engineering is doing mostly radical design so far, and Michael would like to see it move towards normal design. But is it possible that the nature of software precludes normal design a priori?

Pamela Zave is now talking about applying some of these principles to telecommunications. I didn't see the relationship to Michael's talk, it seemed to be about an architecture for composable telecom system features. I'm afraid I didn't quite follow, though.