What's Good Software, Anyway?

Landmarks, Critical Paths and Abstractions: What's the Difference Anyway?

Current heuristic estimators for classical domain-independent planning are usually based on one of four ideas: delete relaxations, critical paths, abstractions, and, most recently, landmarks. Previously, these different ideas for deriving heuristic functions were largely unconnected. We prove that admissible heuristics based on these ideas are in fact very closely related. Exploiting this relat...

What's the point of documentation?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that software documentation [Lethbridge et al, 2003] is a Good Thing, and spreadsheets are no exception [Morison & Jordan, 2000]. The FSA, in a recent newsletter [FSA, 2006], described what they had seen in the way of good practice for financial modelling systems: “Acceptable standards of documentation were established, agreed by the firm, and themselves ...

What's not wrong with conditional organ donation?

In a well known British case, the relatives of a dead man consented to the use of his organs for transplant on the condition that they were transplanted only into white people. The British government condemned the acceptance of racist offers and the panel they set up to report on the case condemned all conditional offers of donation. The panel appealed to a principle of altruism and meeting the...

Maintainability versus Performance: What's the Effect of Introducing Polymorphism ?

The notion of refactoring —transforming the sourcecode of an object-oriented program without changing its external behavior— has been embraced by many objectoriented software developers as a way to accommodate changing requirements. If applied well, refactoring improves the maintainability of the software, however it is believed that it does so at the sake of performance. To investigate this tr...

What's good for the goose, is good for the gander.