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What is dubbed as an "architecture astronaut" is, in my opinion, a researcher in software engineering as is the work they do. Largely, software engineering and
by Frost1x 5y ago
What is dubbed as an "architecture astronaut" is, in my opinion, a researcher in software engineering as is the work they do. Largely, software engineering and practices aren't well defined and there's a lot of ways to approach a problem. We haven't found best approaches but in many cases we've slowly began converging on some architectural approaches for applications. These are really frameworks to think of how to approach a specific type of software system, much in the way research provides foundational theory to think of work in its domain.
We don't think of it that way, but I personally believe that's really what it is. It's a reductionist (abstracted) approach of developing a framework around a set of observations. Just like research, it may be too far abstracted to be relevant to the problem at hand and may take years before it becomes useful. That's just my perspective, though.
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoI think that's a reasonable way of framing it I guess, but the reality is the industry on the whole doesn't have a place to put people like this. Most companies don't have a need for that kind of research. They just have to ship something. Nor is it the case that everyone who does this kind of "research" is actually qualified to be doing it.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> What is dubbed as an "architecture astronaut" is, in my opinion, a researcher in software engineering as is the work they do. So they're publishing papers with falsifiable hypotheses and subjecting themselves to peer review, right? No? Oh.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoIsn't all software engineering research peer-reviewed? Like Transactions of the ACM, all the great conferences etc. Or was that in the last millennium only?
- chrisseaton 5y agoThat was my point - they aren’t publishing papers so they aren’t doing research. They’re just standing up at conferences and giving opinions with no data to back it up. That's not what a researcher or 'scientist' (as some call themselves) do.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoAh got it you're saying that so call "architecture astronauts" are not publishing, like serious computer scientists are (?)
- chrisseaton 5y agoThe person I replied to said 'What is dubbed as an "architecture astronaut" is, in my opinion, a researcher', but that's not true - they're not researchers, for the reasons explained.
- lmm 5y agoA good researcher should be an empiricist. They might want to test whether a pet theory applies to a new domain, but they should be challenging that assumption and open to the possibility that it doesn't. The architects who cause problems are those who dogmatically insist on a particular approach in defiance of all evidence.