Cover Image
QR Code

EMPIRICAL STUDIES TO BUILD A SCIENCE OF COMPUTER SCIENCE.

The article discusses the role of empiricism in software development. An empirical approach has to take into account both human and technological considerations. From 1976 to 2002 the NASA Goddard Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) practiced experimental methods with respect to software design. T...

Full description

Published in:Communications of the ACM Vol. 50; no. 11; pp. 33 - 38
Main Authors: Basili, Victor R., Zelkowitz, Marvin V.
Format: Article
Published: Association for Computing Machinery Nov2007
Subjects:
Computer software development
Empirical research
Empiricism
Software engineering
Grounded theory
Experiments
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
Summary:The article discusses the role of empiricism in software development. An empirical approach has to take into account both human and technological considerations. From 1976 to 2002 the NASA Goddard Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) practiced experimental methods with respect to software design. Through controlled experiments and case studies, SEL was able to reduce the incidence of defects in software while increasing the quantity of reusable code. SEL's experience reinforces the notion that experimentation needs to go beyond software engineering to permeate all of computer science.