PragPub 2010-01: Issue #7 by The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Author:The Pragmatic Bookshelf
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: PragPub—Monthly Magazine
Publisher: The Pragmatic Bookshelf, LLC
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Fads and Progress

In fact, software development has little to do with most established engineering disciplines, and some people in the community (notably, but not exclusively, Tom DeMarco) have spoken against this paradigm. For this reason it is frustrating and disappointing that SEMAT, a supposedly “re-foundational” effort, is still trapped in the old and worn engineering metaphor: it takes for granted that we do “software engineering,” and that we should strive to do what other engineers do instead of wasting our time with “fads” that are more like this season’s frivolous fashion trends than like the serious, professional, piecemeal progress we should be aiming for.

Let’s turn a blind eye to the fact that several of those “fads” were started or promoted by some of the signatories of SEMAT. It is true that fads are prevalent in the software industry. But some of them (for instance, object orientation or extreme programming) end up being pretty good ideas, and some become mainstream. We stifle innovation if we dismiss every grassroots innovation and every exciting new idea as nothing more than a capricious fad just because it doesn’t fit with our preconceptions of what progress should look like.

And what should progress look like? The SEMAT call for action offers several hints, not all of them far-sighted. For example, it tells us that we should evaluate and validate practices experimentally. I’m in favor of controlled experiments in software research, of course, but I don’t think they should be singled out as the only or the most important empirical strategy at our disposal. As a researcher who has applied both experimental and non-experimental methods in software development, I have seen that controlled experiments tend to abstract away important elements of the phenomena we study, whereas non-experimental methods, such as case studies, provide a richness that is necessary and insightful. But since we see that engineers give primacy to experiments, we feel we should imitate them.

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