FEATURE ARTICLE
Empirical Software Engineering
As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up
Greg Wilson, Jorge Aranda
Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences, but the rigorous examination of cause and effect that characterizes science has been much less common in this field than in supposedly soft disciplines like marketing, which use rigorous, quantitative and analytic approaches. Some researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. This burgeoning field is known as empirical software engineering and as interest in it has exploded over the past decade, it has begun to borrow and adapt research techniques from fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, industrial engineering and data mining.
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Comments
"Managers and programmers alike often brush the data away, clinging to the idea that putting two people on one job must double staffing requirements and therefore cannot deliver efficiency."
I am a b...
posted by Steve Cheung
October 21, 2011 @ 12:47 PM
I appreciated this article as far as it went, and space limitations always require abridgements. Even so, requirements gathering, client organizational culture, and budgeting/scope creep can be extr...
posted by Michael Lehr
October 29, 2011 @ 6:00 PM
"Solutions produced by the pairs took 60 percent more total time, but dividing the total time by two, they completed the tasks 20 percent faster."
Huh? If the pairs are two people wouldn't you *multi...
posted by Mike Maxwell
November 20, 2011 @ 5:12 PM
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