Making Software

Looking Toward the Future

Despite the decades of software engineering research, so far we have seen relatively few examples of convincing evidence that have actually led to changes in how people run software projects. We speculate that this is due to the context problem: researchers have been generating evidence about A, and the audience cares about B, C, D, and so on. We recommend a little more humility among researchers exploring evidence about software engineering, at least as things stand now, and a willingness to mingle with and listen to software practitioners who can help us better figure out what B, C, and D actually are. We think our field may need to retire, at least for a time, the goal of seeking evidence about results that hold for all projects in all cases; finding local results that make a difference tends to be challenging enough.

Endres and Rombach proposed a view of how knowledge gets built about software and systems engineering [Endres and Rombach 2003]:

• Observations of what actually happens during development in a specific context can happen all the time. (“Observation” in this case is defined to comprise both hard facts and subjective impressions.)

• Recurring observations lead to laws that help understand how things are likely to occur in the future.

• Laws are explained by theories that explain why those events happen.

Given the complexity of the issues currently being tackled by empirical research, we’d like to slow the rush to theory-building. A more productive model ...