Communications of the ACM

Real-time debug and test is still a “lost world” compared to the “civilization” developed in other areas of software, says Robert L. Glass. From a survey of current practice across several projects and companies, he defines a state of the art for this ...

Choosing the right program structures can lead to better programs, says Joshua Turner. He advocates modular design to make large programs more manageable. Turner reviews the possible structural relationships between the modules of a program and ...

Sequential testing procedures for checking the rule-applicability of the decision tables encountered in practice are usually found to be minimum-path-length trees. On the basis of this observation, an algorithm is developed for converting decision ...

The decision grid chart is investigated as an intermediate form in constructing decision tables; a very natural extension to the basic format is proposed. Five alternative procedures for the conversion of decision grid charts into compressed decision ...

In hierarchical search the data structure holding the file keys is partitioned into substructures of the same type; these are searched consecutively until the queried key is found or the substructures are exhausted. The interest here is in the ...