Comments on Rafael rambling: Unsolicited and uninformed rant about Software Eng...

@paul Indeed I was applying a narrow interpretatio...

2011-05-24T18:41:23.435-03:00

@paul
Indeed I was applying a narrow interpretation of the term "software engineering" and my concerns don't necessarily apply to the broader view. A view so broad, in fact, that it makes it hard to say anything about it in general.

@catenary I will try to look into more recent soft...

2011-05-24T18:38:22.245-03:00

@catenary I will try to look into more recent software engineering research, perhaps Greg Wilson's Making Software will be a good first step?

I updated the post to mention the team doing the interviews.

Thanks for the comment.

"I just want to emphasize the most interestin...

2011-05-24T18:05:06.745-03:00

"I just want to emphasize the most interesting research, from my point of view, is the one that tries to understand, not merely to optimze."

Great point, Rafael, and great post overall. I should say that a lot of current research tries to do just that (to understand), though this was not the case some ten years ago. I think our community is becoming a bit more humble. Perhaps in its earlier times it did not recognize that its idea of software development was completely misguided, and it has taken lots of time to recognize that we don't really know much that we should know about what goes on in software organizations, and to rectify this.

I also must point out that it was a bunch of us doing the interviews you refer to besides myself: Margaret-Anne Storey, Marian Petre, and Daniela Damian.

--Jorge Aranda

I think the real problem is the overloaded term, &...

2011-05-23T14:53:42.793-03:00

I think the real problem is the overloaded term, "Software Engineering." You seem to be focusing on a rather small piece of software engineering (process).

The focus of software engineering is the construction, delivery, and deployment of "systems of systems", and the managerial aspects in producing those systems.

Software architecture, requirements elicitation and specification, validation and verification, formal and semi-formal methods, software and system evolution, software project management, and Software development life cycles are all fair game for research.

Dependable systems, distributed systems, autonomic computing, software artifact identification and extraction, and reverse engineering are also fair game.

Much of what is commonplace in software development today came from research in all of these fields.

It appears like you're only looking at "research" being published by industrial labs or reported in Software Developer Times. Rather, you should look at leading journals and conferences for substantial research in the field.

I agree though, despite software engineering being concerned with the human/person piece of software development, one has to hope that researches in cognitive psychology, behavioral science, and communication attributes and theories within certain processes, focus on our industry for relevant and influential information.

Paul deGrandis
http://www.pauldee.org
http://www.pauldee.org/blog

Hey Ferreira, I'm into some of the subjects. ...

2011-05-22T20:48:48.578-03:00

Hey Ferreira,

I'm into some of the subjects. Wanna grab a beer sometime and talk about it?