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Software Engineering Between Technics and Science

Recent Discussions about the Foundations and the Scientificness of a Rising Discipline

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Notes

  1. It is perhaps no surprise that particularly the social sciences clinge so strongly to the idea of methodologically correct ways of hypothesis generation as main criterion of their ‘scientificness’, since their hypotheses themselves are so much harder to test experimentally than the hypotheses generated in the natural sciences.

  2. See the Philosophy of Computer Science website with many literature references at http://pcs.essex.ac.uk/ .

  3. The term Denkzeug is now so popular in German philosophical language that I was not able to trace its origin, but I know that it was also used by Walter Zimmerli in his philosophy of (computer) technology in the 1990s.

  4. See for example the organisation Formal Methods Europe (FME), online at http://www.fmeurope.org/.

  5. Maibaum attributed this quotation to Tony Hoare.

  6. See for example the European association of software science and technology (EASST), online at http://www.easst.org/.

  7. See for example CBSE, the annual symposium on component based software engineering, published regularly in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the students of my Software Engineering seminar in 2008 at the University of Pretoria for interesting discussions on the context of this article. Thanks also to Tom Maibaum for inspiring conversations during the ICFEM International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods in Kitakyushu, Japan, October 2008. Also the fruitful discussions with my colleagues Derrick Kourie and Morkel Theunissen are gratefully acknowledged. I also thank Markus Roggenbach for an example which I have used in Sect. 3. Last but not least thanks to the editors and reviewers of this journal for their thoughtful feedback and helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this contribution, as well as to the production office for their professional typesetting of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Stefan Gruner.

Appendix: Further Reading in the Wider Context of this Discourse

Most of the papers listed in this appendix are written in a rather non-technical style and should thus be understandable also for readers not familiar with the field of software engineering. Note that I do not claim this to be a complete list of all the relevant literature in the context of this essay-review; this list should rather be taken as an “interesting selection” of recommendable and easily accessible titles, which are suitable for pointing the non-expert reader to some key issues in the wider area of software engineering.

Appendix: Further Reading in the Wider Context of this Discourse

Armour, P.G. (2006). The Business of Software. Communications of the ACM, 49/9, 15–17.

Bergin, T.J. (2007). A History of the History of Programming Languages. Communications of the ACM, 50/5, 69–74.

da-Cunha, A.D. & Greathead, D. (2007). Does Personality matter?—An Analysis of Code-Review-Ability. Communications of the ACM, 50/5, 109–112.

Feitelson, D.G. (ed.) (2007). Experimental Computer Science. Communications of the ACM, 50/11, 24-59.

Floridi, L. (1999). Philosophy and Computing: An Introduction. Routledge.

Florman, S.C. (1996). The Introspective Engineer. St. Martin’s Griffin.

Fujita, H. & Pisanelli, D. (eds.) (2007). New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques. Proceedings of the 6th SOMET Conference. IOS Press.

Glass, R.L. (2007). One Man’s Quest for the State of Software Engineering’s Practice. Communications of the ACM, 50/5, 21-23.

Jeffries, R. & Melnik, G. (Eds.) (2007). Test-Driven Development. IEEE Software, 24/3, 24– 83.

McBride, M.R. (2007). The Software Architect. Communications of the ACM, 50/5, 75–82.

Rajlich, V. (2006). Changing the Paradigm of Software Engineering. Communications of the ACM, 49/8, 67–70.

Sugumaran, V. & Park, S. & Kang, K.C. (eds.) (2006). Software Product Line Engineering. Communications of the ACM, 49/12, 28–89.

Turski, W.M. (2000). Essay on Software Engineering at the Turn of the Century. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1783, 1–20.

Vincenti, W.G. (1993). What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History. Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Gruner, S. Software Engineering Between Technics and Science. J Gen Philos Sci 41, 237–260 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-010-9116-y

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