Category: 1. Research
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On the Ordering of Nouns in Writing
Effective writing is important, or you won’t be understood and achieve your goal. An example is to get the ordering of nouns (or adjectives) in enumerations right. Let’s pick an example: In software engineering, a software feature’s implementation should be correct, complete, and testable. So a project goal could be “to ensure correctness, completeness, and…
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How to Have an Impact as a Software Engineering Researcher
Over on Facebook of all places, I took part in a short discussion on how, as a researcher, to have an impact on practice. It is not a convenient answer, but in my opinion, if you want to have an impact, you should go into practice yourself. You can also send your students, but this…
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Traditional Theory Building and Validation in (Computer) Science
Many computer science degree programs do a lousy job at teaching science. A high school student, entering university, often has a good idea what science is about, based on their physics and chemistry classes. At least, it involves controlled experiments. At university, this is rarely picked up, and computer science students are given the idea…
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The Real Problem with Pay-walled Publications
Pay-walled publications are just that: Publications that nobody reads unless someone pays the publisher’s fee. I have no problem with that, because I don’t read pay-walled work and don’t consider it published research and prior art that I should care about. The real problem starts with researchers and editors who expect me to find, read,…
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How Not to Ask Your Research Question (And What to do About it)
In software engineering, the structure of research theses, most notably dissertations, is straightforward: (1) Formulate a research question, choose a method, build a theory, then (2) generate at least one interesting hypothesis, choose a method, and test the hypothesis as part of the theory’s attempted validation. A dissertation can do both parts 1 and 2…
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Anecdotal Evidence on the Method Wars
On a whim, I asked my Twitterverse (which includes a fair number of computer scientists) what they think about the following question: When peer-reviewing somebody else’s work submitted for publication, what should you do if you find that the authors have a different belief than you about what can be known?