Claude Petitpierre

Claude Petitpierre has received his diploma of Electrical Engineer in 1972 from EPFL. He spent the next 5 years in the industry, where he participated in the development of realtime cement plant control. He went back to EPFL, obtained the title of Doctor in 1984 and then spent one year (1985-1986) at the AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel. He was appointed professor in 1987.

He is interested in the theories and techniques that can support the development of complete and reliable software products and in the formal modeling and analysis theories. The work pursued in his laboratory led to the development of a parsimonious superset of Java, supporting concurrency with a concept close to the one provided by formal languages such as CCS or CSP. He is currently devising a development environment that supports the creation of J2EE application in the frame of software engineering.

Claude Petitpierre is also interested in computer aided teaching. He has developed a computer aided programming course that has been used by first year students.

From Business Services to IT Services by Capturing Design Decisions

Claude Petitpierre, Alain Wegmann

The main goals of any service-oriented design include flexible support and adaptability of business services and improved business-IT alignment. The existing approaches, however, have failed to fully meet these goals. One of the major reasons for this deficiency is the gap that exists between how the computer science and management science communities perceive the concept of service. We present a flexible, semi-automatic, model-driven approach to designing IT services that directly satisfy business needs and requirements. We begin with the design of business services and the capture of the design decisions that transform the business design through multiple model layers to the IT service design. All layers can be simulated using the Alloy Analyzer tool. The last layer can be run on a given target platform. This approach is demonstrated on the running example based on the consulting project conducted at the company General Ressort. The central aspect of our approach is separating the design decisions from anything that can be automated. It provides the multi-perspective view of the system, by making the modeling process faster, leaving the designer the space to focus on the design decisions and not on drawing the models.

2012

Debugging by lastChange

Salman Mirghasemi, Claude Petitpierre

Developers often seek the origins of wrong values they see in their debugger. Their search must be backwards in time: the code causing the wrong value executed before the wrong value appeared. Searching with breakpoint- or log- based debuggers demands persistence and significant experience with the application being debugged. We introduce a new, practical feature for debuggers called \textit{lastChange}, which automatically locates the last point that a variable or an object property has been changed. Starting from a program halted on a breakpoint, the \textit{lastChange} solution applies queries to the live program during re-execution, recording the call stack and limited program state each time the property value changes. When the program halts again on the breakpoint, the recorded information can be shown to the developer. As a proof of this concept, we developed \textit{Querypoint}, a prototype which enhances the popular Firebug JavaScript debugger with the \textit{lastChange} feature and studied users applying the prototype to some test cases. The approach used in implementing \textit{lastChange} combines the flexibility of breakpoint debugging with the expressive power of log-based query debugging. Contrary to other replay-based approaches, which require exactly the same re-executions (deterministic executions), our new approach only requires \textit{bug reproducibility}, meaning a test case is available which reproduces the bug and a way to halt execution reliably after the reproduction.

2011

A Model-Driven Environment for Service Design, Simulation and Prototyping

From Business Services to IT Services by Capturing Design Decisions

Debugging by lastChange

From Business Services to IT Services by Capturing Design Decisions

A Model-Driven Environment for Service Design, Simulation and Prototyping

Debugging by lastChange