The Shape of Code

Software engineering research is a field of dots; people are fully focused on publishing papers about their chosen tiny little subject.

Where are the books joining the dots into even a vague outline?

Several software researchers have told me that writing books is not a worthwhile investment of their time, i.e., the number of citations they are likely to attract makes writing papers the only cost-effective medium (books containing an edited collection of papers continue to be published).

Butterfly collecting has become the method of study for many researchers. The butterflies in question often being Github repos that are collected together, based on some ‘interestingness’ metric, and then compared and contrasted in a conference paper.

The dots being collected are influenced by the problems that granting agencies consider to be important topics to fund (picking a research problem that will attract funding is a major consideration for any researcher). Fake research is one consequence of incentivizing people to use particular techniques in their research.

Whatever you think the aims of research in software engineering might be, funding the random collecting of dots does not seem like an effective strategy.

Perhaps it is just a matter of waiting for the field to grow up. Evidence-based software engineering research is still a teenager, and the novelty of butterfly collecting has yet to wear off.

My study of particular kinds of dots did not reveal many higher level patterns, although a number of folk theories were shown to be unfounded.