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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1802.06321,
title = {The Dangerous Dogmas of Software Engineering},
author = {Paul Ralph and Briony J. Oates},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.06321},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
12 pages