Category «Research»

Discovery and validation of new ideas.

ASA statement on p-values

There has been controversy around p-values in recent years, often linked to issues with reproducibility in psychology.  p-values are also often reported in empirical software engineering papers. We haven’t yet seen widespread public controversy about software engineering studies, but that’s not because there aren’t problems! The American Statistical Association has just released a clarifying statement …

More Philosophy of Engineering

In January, the the journal Synthese accepted and published the first of two papers of mine on the philosophy of engineering.  The second installment is now also accepted and published: “Critical rationalism and engineering: methodology” (author’s preprint here). Woot!  In the new paper I use the three worlds schema from the first paper to look …

Philosophy of Engineering

What is engineering? Sometimes people think engineering is just the same as science, but in a new paper on the philosophy of engineering (preprint here), I argue why that’s not the case. Engineering is similar, but different to Science, and its epistemological issues are also similar but different. I got into this question because of …

Is Informatics a Science?

Robin Milner gave a presentation “Is Informatics a Science?” at a conference at ENS, 10 December 2007, where he discussed the challenge of better understanding relationships between models in computer science – how they “explain” (specify, refine, implement, abstract, realise) each other. I don’t believe he captured these thoughts in a journal or conference paper, …

What is Software Architecture?

What is software architecture? There have been many definitions. Here’s mine. First let’s consider some of the earlier definitions. SEI has a huge collection of definitions on its website, including “classic” definitions, bibliographic definitions (stops in 1996?), “modern” definitions, and definitions submitted from the community.  Perry and Wolf (1992) have perhaps the most classic definition, …

Invention vs Innovation

Just heard in a QESP webinar on Software Innovation in Australia from Julian Day of the Australia Consensus Awards: In business, invention is the conversion of cash into ideas, but innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash. Nice.  I see this is also on wikipedia.  I wonder what’s the original source for this quote?

Reference Management

Researchers “stand on the shoulders of giants“, which in practice means reading a lot of academic papers and reports.  Lots.  You not only want to read them, but also cite them in papers you write, search them, and organise them by whatever topics you’re investigating.  How do you do that? When I was a PhD …

Academic Academy Awards

I had to laugh at Liming’s latest micro-blog posting, Why are papers in top conferences very boring (these days)? It’s funny, but I’m not sure I entirely agree – I think top conferences do have interesting papers.  Liming is saying interesting ideas won’t necessarily have had time to be well validated, and by the time …

Reflections at WICSA

WICSA was fun.  I usually find the most I can hope for in a conference is 1 or 2 papers that are really interesting, but I think WICSA cleared 5, so it was well worthwhile.  What I particularly enjoy about conferences is hearing how people verbally describe the ideas and challenges in the field.  You …

The Next Big Thing?

How can you tell what the next big thing is going to be? Google’s pagerank algorithm will tell you what web pages have been important enough in the past for other people to have linked to.   Google trends will tell you what search terms people have been using recently, again in the past. What …