The world and the machine

Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 2008

Over the past four decades, software engineering has emerged as a discipline in its own right, though it has roots both in computer science and in classical engineering. Its philosophical foundations and premises are not yet well understood. In recent times, members of the software engineering community have started to search for such foundations. In particular, the philosophies of Kuhn and Popper have been used by philosophically-minded software engineers in search of a deeper understanding of their discipline. It seems, however, that professional philosophers of science are not yet aware of this new discourse within the field of software engineering. Therefore, this article aims to reflect critically upon recent software engineers' attempts towards a philosophy of software engineering and to introduce our own philosophical thoughts in this context. Finally, we invite the professional philosophers of science to participate in this interesting new discourse.

2015

Context:. Software engineering is a discipline that has been shaped by over 50 years of practice. Driven primarily by the needs of industry, a theoretical basis has been slow to develop. Objective:. A cogent theory of software engineering improves the maturity of our discipline, placing it alongside other engineering disciplines whose theories are apparent. Moreover, given that software engineering produces some of the most complex and versatile objects that have ever been designed, we might also like to reflect whether what has been learned in software engineering might not be usefully reflected in other engineering areas. Method:. The theory was developed through empirical observation of practice together with philosophical argument from which a principled basis was developed. The paper brings together and explicates over 10 years of research in this area. Results:. We describe two theories of software engineering. The first special theory brings together phenomena of specific int...

Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 1991

In this paper I will give a contribution to the creative conversation on fu-ture development and use of computer technology which Bo Dahlbom and Lars-Erik Janlert invited to in their paper published in the previous volume of SJIS.They argued that as software development now ...

Information and Software Technology, 1996

The paper is concerned with bridging the interdisciplinary divide between the technical and social aspects in the enterprise of software engineering. We do this by developing a postmodernist perspective on software engineering, disputing the notion of a grand narrative of software engineering (that is, an exclusive and embracing account of software engineering as a technical, rational project) by offering a series of accounts of a key meeting in a software project. These accounts both trade-off and disrupt a technical, rational narrative and indicate that the current situation in software engineering is one of stasis. However, our analysis indicates also a potential for diversity in software engineering with the valorization of differences, pluralities and heterogeneities at the expense of grand theory.

2004

Drastic changes have occurred in the field of software development in the past few years. Concepts that have been proposed in recent times are very different from what has been done in the past. The philosophical shifts underlying these changes present many challenges -both technical and organizational. Such shifts are not peculiar to software development as parallels in other disciplines exist. The goal of this paper is to articulate the changes from a philosophical perspective and to examine the organizational implications that arise as a consequence. In particular, the article focuses on the conceptual differences between traditional and contemporary approaches within the context of inquiring systems, the philosophy of science, general systems theory, and soft systems methodology.

2009

Science and technology studies (STS) is a discipline concerned with examining how social and technological worlds shape each other. In this paper, we argue that STS can be used to study the work of software development as a complex, interacting system of people, organizations, culture, practices, and technology, or in STS terms, an assemblage. We illustrate the application of these ideas to the work of software development, where STS theory directs us towards examining at human-human relations, humanmachine relations, and machine-machine relations. We conclude by discussing some of the challenges of applying STS in empirical software engineering.

The requirements for most software systems -- the intended states-of-affairs these systems are supposed to bring about -- concern their operational environment, often a socio- physical world. But software systems usually don’t have any direct means to change that environment in order to bring about the intended states-of-affairs. In what sense then can we say that such systems fulfill their requirements? The main purpose of this paper is to account for this paradox. We do so by proposing a preliminary Ontology of Assumptions. This ontology aims to characterize and make explicit a number of notions that are used implicitly in software engineering practice to establish that a system specification S fulfills its requirements R given a set of assumptions A. Our proposal is illustrated with an example concerning a meeting scheduler.

IEEE Software, 2000