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Software engineering research is immature and, as such, has few (no?) strongly-supported claims that the entire field relies on. I agree this is a frustrating s

Software engineering research is immature and, as such, has few (no?) strongly-supported claims that the entire field relies on. I agree this is a frustrating state of the field, but the way this is written makes the author appear to be unfamiliar with the state of things. For example: >Did I mention that all three of those papers use different definitions of “defect”? This kind of thing is really common in academia. I do not know software engineering research in detail, but there are older and more basic definitional fights in the social sciences. Defining a defect, as I'm sure the author of the blog would agree, is not a trivial decision. In general, this piece contains (perhaps hyperbolic?) dismissals of people trying to do work. It doesn't seem to respect what I imagine is earnest effort. Taken all together, it seems like the author either thinks the entire field is charlatans (which I doubt as they use the fields' conclusions at the end) or is making light of people working on problems they themselves do not have answers to in order to have a more lively writing style. It was fun to read and left a bad taste in my mouth.

BadInformatics 5y ago
As mentioned in TFA, the author has both written and spoken about software engineering research and related topics in some depth before. Though fiery, I think it does its job as a more informal cautionary tale on accepting research in the field without a critical gaze. Analyses like [1] and [2] (from the same author) are extraordinarily valuable because they help us wade through the firehose of published studies to find what (if any) conclusions may be gleaned. Without such a filter, we are fated to a) repeat work by slogging through the torrent ourselves, or b) taking stuff at face value. Certainly there is no shortage of the latter happening on forums like this, and I wonder how many misinformed decisions are made as a result. [1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

BadInformatics 5y ago

As mentioned in TFA, the author has both written and spoken about software engineering research and related topics in some depth before. Though fiery, I think it does its job as a more informal cautionary tale on accepting research in the field without a critical gaze. Analyses like [1] and [2] (from the same author) are extraordinarily valuable because they help us wade through the firehose of published studies to find what (if any) conclusions may be gleaned. Without such a filter, we are fated to a) repeat work by slogging through the torrent ourselves, or b) taking stuff at face value. Certainly there is no shortage of the latter happening on forums like this, and I wonder how many misinformed decisions are made as a result. [1] https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ https://danluu.com/empirical-pl/ [2] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/ https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/