Nick, In the paper that I mentioned in a previous posting, Wieringa claimed that much of the Software Engineering (SE) research does not apply scientific methods. Not only that I agreed with him, but I claimed that the situation is even worth than that; in many of the SE papers the underlying research questions are not scientific. I presented this position in the 2007 European conference on Computing and Philosophy. The core science that universities teach to would be software engineers is computer science. The anecdotes presented in earlier postings of this thread indicated the existence of a problem for which computer science does not seem to be the source of cure. The community of PPIG may be interested in the proposition that we, software engineers, must be well educated in computer science, but the field of science to which the above mentioned problems belong is not mathematics, but psychology (which includes sociology, etc.). The extended abstract to the conference is available on request. So, Nick, the answer that I humbly offer to your question is two fold. One, Wieringa provides a rather detailed answer, which I couldn't write better. Two, what makes science what it is, is not only the methods but the questions asked. -- Hanania
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Flor Sent: Saturday, October 06, 2007 13:46 To: Hanania Salzer; discuss@ppig.org Subject: RE: PPIG discuss: When agile goes bad.... Hanania, what scientific methods would you propose to evaluate competing software development perspectives? BTW, I think Fleck's "Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact" is far more relevant to the discussion of method adoption than Kuhn's. - Nick -- Nick V. Flor, PhD Associate Professor, Information Systems Anderson School of Management University of New Mexico [EMAIL PROTECTED]
