I think this is the one of the most interesting discussions we've had
on this list for the 5 years that I've been a member. As I am probably
vastly incorrectly interrupting Ruven - the question is - what should we,
as PPIGer's, study.
Well, I work in a gov't funded Software Engineering Lab, and believe me,
it's an important question. As a little anecdote, a couple of years
ago at the International Conference on Software Maintenance, I presented
some work on the daily activities done by software engineers (reports of
a field study). Directly after the talk, the VP of research of a fairly
large corporation, came and told me, "Yeah, all well and good, but I did
a study at our company, and found that it only takes about 5 minutes to
change the code and 105 HOURS to get that code into production." Meaning
to me, that what I was studying was insignificant in the context of the
larger software engineering community and the problems it was facing.
This suggests that the notion of applying psychology to software
engineering is important, as this VP told me, but that maybe the questions
we are pursuing are unimportant in the context of industrial problems.
So, I pose this question to all of you? What should we be studying, CMM,
languages, configuration managment, distributed software development,
management of large software teams, etc...
Janice
