The term “Software Engineering” is flawed, according to Neil Ernst, and I agree completely: it is a metaphor that conveys all sorts of incorrect connotations about the diverse and complex nature of software development. I don’t use it anymore if I can avoid it, and neither should you.
Entries Tagged as ‘Academia’
May 31, 2009
Andy Ko and the semblance of objectivity in numbers
Andy Ko blogged yesterday about having a paper rejected at FSE, the Foundations of Software Engineering Conference, because it used qualitative research methods. His post includes depressing snippets from his reviews, and his replies are fitting and well worth reading:
Transforming empirical observations into numbers does NOT make them objective, nor does it prevent bias and [...]
May 24, 2009
ICSE 2009 highlights
Here’s the list of my highlights from ICSE 2009. It is, of course, a very partial list, focused on the “human” or “soft” or “cooperative” or “whatever-its-name-is” side of software development that interests me.
The CHASE workshop
The Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering workshop is the one I always look forward to, and if most [...]
May 23, 2009
Bibliometrics
Hmmm…
Should we heed David Parnas’ call for dismissing bibliometrics information? After all, how can he be right? It’s only been cited twice so far…
May 23, 2009
The Secret Life of Bugs: a brief summary
Well, my ICSE talk has come and gone, and I’m very happy with it and with the feedback I got. Now, with the talk behind, I feel it’s a good idea to give a brief summary of what the paper Gina and I wrote is all about. I should say though, if you’re interested in [...]
May 21, 2009
Presenting at ICSE 2009
If you’re attending ICSE 2009, do come to the talk on The Secret Life of Bugs tomorrow (Thursday) at the Maintenance session, 11am!
If you’re curious about the paper, and don’t have access to the proceedings, you can find it on this link. I’ll write some more about the study after I’m done with the presentation.
Wish [...]
March 4, 2009
The Origin of Man
Kate Beaton’s grasp of scientific progress behind-the-curtain is remarkably accurate:
OK so maybe this was not true for Darwin. Software Engineering research? That’s another story…
(Also, check out the rest of Kate’s work –it’s consistently fresh and fun. Via Joey de Villa)
February 26, 2009
More on measurement
Related to yesterday’s post and to an entry I wrote two years ago on measurement, I just found an old (2003) post from Martin Fowler on why we can’t measure productivity in software development. He’s much clearer than I am, and his article is well worth reading. His conclusion:
I can see why measuring productivity is [...]
February 25, 2009
Experimentation and argumentation
Just a reflection spawned from a recent post by Greg Wilson and a later discussion at the lab (I had to leave early, so I don’t know how it ended):
In a research discipline with few or no mature constructs, such as ours, experimentation is little more than disguised, expensive, and poorly grounded argumentation. It is [...]
February 11, 2009
Not crazy about Wordle
You’re probably familiar with Wordle. It’s a neat application that picks up the most common words in a text and arranges them in a pretty word cloud. As a toy, it’s quite fun.
But there’s an idea seeping in among the blogs I read, suggesting that Wordle clouds are actually useful as a communication tool. For [...]
