All, >Following on from the highly successful joint PPIG/EASE workshop in Keele at >Easter, why not join with the Empirical Software Engineering community to >discuss issues pertaining to evidence? > >The PPIG community has done important work on the tools used by software >engineers, for example, on programming languages and notations. However, >PPIG shares a concern with the Empirical Software Engineering community that >this work is not sufficiently informing software engineering practice. One >reason might be that the work is not sufficiently visible to practitioners; >another might be scepticism as to the external validity of our results.
Complete disbelief would not be too strong a way of putting it. The obvious problem is that many academics (well at least the majority of the ones I have spoken to in any depth) don't have a clue about the issues that are important in commercial software development. However, this is just the symptom of other underlying issues. For instance: o why be an academic investigating these problems when you could be paid more in industry to do it? o just like people in the commercial world academics want to get on in the world. This means fitting in with existing research 'agendas' (which are rarely commercially oriented; "it will be relevant in future years", ha ha). o academics do research that interests them (and why not, they ought to get something out of taking a lower paid job). I am slowly coming to the conclusion that there is a very low probability of any solutions to software engineering problems coming from academia. The people involved have little applicable knowledge and the social forces involved are not pushing them in the appropriate direction. derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
