John Shipman

The pastebin looked fine but an issue may be that some of the data/samples in supporting research are so old as to be difficult to apply to modern infrastructure, and the HR question still stands.

I will take a look at http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/soft/clean/ tomorrow (evening here).

I agree with your assertions around reasonable use of prior work. I personally came to similar methods designing security-oriented systems (eg. at Kraken), eg. by strictly defining a protocol in a formalistic manner with a language suited for that purpose, then generating interfaces for client systems ... and even application-level enforcement proxies that can be inserted either during testing or (preferably) even automatically during live deployment. This amounts to automated application-level middleware, for SOA-type systems, direct from protocol spec.

Enforcement proxies ensure that broken implementation A and broken implementation B may only talk correct subset C of any given protocol, block and alarm on noncompliant communications, make otherwise restricted communication between nodes extremely difficult for attackers to use to horizontally expand any foothold established through security breaches. Assertions may be enforced in real time. Logging may occur there also. Very useful stuff. Not actually that hard to do, in practice. By contrast, the current norm of arbitrary HTTP POST with barely enforced JSON is a leaky bucket of slop.

Altran link 404s for me.

The internet's basis in…

Firstly, if you're desperate for a job, ignore the advice below. If you're not desperate, and can afford to walk away and move on to the next interview, following the advice below will ensure you're not taken advantage of during the interview and recruiting process.

Two golden, inviolable, rules:

1. Never lie.

2. Never be the first to name a number.

For the "What is you current salary?" question, you can answer with any of the below responses. They get increasing stern, so gauge which one to use based upon your impression of how aggressive the employer is.

- "My current employer does not allow me to discuss the terms of my employment"

- "This position is not exactly the same as my current job, so let’s discuss what my responsibilities would be here and then determine a fair salary for this job."

- "I’m happy to help you evaluate what I’d be worth to your business based upon my skills, experience and the value that I can add to your organisation, but my current salary is personal and confidential, just as the salaries of your own employees are."

For the "What salary are you seeking?" question, use the Noel Smith-Wenkle method (http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/org/noel.html). In a nutshell, you move through the following answers for each time they repeat the question or try to pin you down to a specific figure.

1st answer: "I am much more interested in doing (type of work) here at (name of company) than I am in the size of the initial offer."

2nd answer: "I will…

"Interesting discussion, I'd be keen to try such a formalistic approach if you ever have a need for a remote critical eye."

I'll try to keep it in mind. There's a few people doing stuff in public if you want to play with it. Plus lists to stuff to try. Here's a few.

One person did an overview of Cleanroom and examples in Python, etc here:

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/soft/clean/

I just pulled a list of techniques that were empirically proven to increase robustness into a Pastebin:

http://pastebin.com/xZ6m4T8Z

Note: One can pick and choose among these to find right work/benefit ratio. I'd like to see lots of experiments on mainstream software to get data on what's 80/20 rule. I'm betting on sane subsets of safe languages, code reviews, usage-driven testing, interface checks (even asserts), and fuzz testing maybe. The first four are widely available and take little work.

Case study of Altran's Correct-by-Construction approach showing great metrics:

https://www.commoncriteriaportal.org/iccc/7iccc/t1/t1201100.pdf

Note: Altran does plenty of medium and high assurance work. Their method can do either. I'd rate Tokeener as Medium-High if just focusing on their part of it. Note that they got it done with 3 part-timers in less than a year with code-level proofs. Quite a leap from millions spent on teams of geniuses doing proofs in Gypsy, etc two years at a time back in the day. :)

"Regarding the quote, I don't think you quite took the spirit of it: the idea is that,…

Have you read Frank Herbert's Jorj McKie series of books?

http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/reading/mckie.html

"The main theme of the two principal Jorj X. McKie stories, Whipping Star and The Dosadi Experiment, is the Bureau of Sabotage, an interesting concept in government that is kind of like a ninja GAO.

The idea is that all governments and other bureaucracies tend to snowball over time, finally becoming juggernauts that crush mere humans unthinkingly. So the Bureau of Sabotage was founded with a legal right to throw wrenches into the gears of bureaucracies. No agency can sabotage the BuSab itself.

So what keeps the BuSab from turning into a juggernaut? Their promotion policy. The way you get promoted is to sabotage your boss."