The Shape of Code

There is a group of software engineering researchers that don’t feature as often as I would like in my evidence-based software engineering book; academics working in business schools.

Business school academics have written some of the best papers I have read on software engineering; the catch is that the data they use is confidential. For somebody writing a book that only discusses a topic if there is data publicly available, this is a problem.

These business school researchers show that it is possible for academics to obtain ‘interesting’ software engineering data from industry. My experience with talking to researchers in computing departments is that most are too involved in their own algorithmic bubble to want to talk to anybody else.

One big difference between the data analysis papers written by academics in computing departments and business schools, is statistical sophistication. Computing papers are still using stone-age pre-computer age techniques, the business papers use a wide range of sophisticated techniques (sometimes cutting edge).

There is one aspect of software engineering papers written by business school researchers that grates with me, many of the authors obviously don’t understand software engineering from a developer’s perspective; well, obviously, they are business oriented people.

The person who has done the largest amount of interesting software engineering research, whose work I don’t (yet; I will find a way) discuss, is Chris Kemerer; a researcher who has a long list of empirical papers going back to the late 1980s, and rarely gets cited by papers by people in computing departments (I am the only person I know, who limits themself to papers where the data is publicly available).