Software, research, and leadership
Software engineering and computer science.
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 …
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 …
Software Engineering would be a more mature discipline if we had spent more time reading What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History rather than A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction.
Marek Kowalkiewicz from the SAP Research in Brisbane just last week won the international “Demo Jam” competition in the SAP TechEd event in LA, for the “Innoboard” software. Innoboard is an augmented reality technology, which lets distributed teams interactively share whiteboards that mix projected images and physical sticky post-it notes. All using the low-cost iphone …
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? 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, …
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?
Liming has raised three points in reference to my Fractal V Lifecycle. His questions are probing the limits of the model in interesting ways. Before I discuss them, I’d like to introduce a concept and some terminology from an earlier paper I wrote. The V model can accommodate as many levels of design abstraction as …
Louis has got a new article version of my earlier blog post on the Fractal V Lifecycle up on alinement.net magazine/community website. He’s also added some thoughts of his own on extending the concept into pre-project activities. For these sorts of activities I tend to favor putting them on top, i.e. on the left but …
NICTA’s recent Techfest in Sydney saw a flurry of news around the announcement of a significant research achievement- the formal verification of the seL4 microkernel. The team developed a mathematical proof of the functional correctness of the microkernel down to the level of the C source code. The achievement is important for two reasons. Firstly, …