Paper Info
Title
The Dangerous Dogmas of Software Engineering.
Abstract
To legitimize itself as a scientific discipline, the software engineering academic community must let go of its non-empirical dogmas. A dogma is belief held regardless of evidence. This paper analyzes the nature and detrimental effects of four software engineering dogmas - 1) the belief that software has "requirements"; 2) the division of software engineering tasks into analysis, design, coding and testing; 3) the belief that software engineering is predominantly concerned with designing "software" systems; 4) the belief that software engineering follows methods effectively. Deconstructing these dogmas reveals that they each oversimplify and over-rationalize aspects of software engineering practice, which obscures underlying phenomena and misleads researchers and practitioners. Evidenced-based practice is analyzed as a means to expose and repudiate non-empirical dogmas. This analysis results in several novel recommendations for overcoming the practical challenges of evidence-based practice.
Year
Venue
Field
2018
arXiv: Software Engineering
Software engineering,Computer science,Coding (social sciences),Software,Academic community
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Journal
abs/1802.06321
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
25
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Paul Ralph110216.19
Briony J. Oates200.68