Latest Comments on Science and Academia

Traditional science has a clear idea of how research is to progress, rationally speaking: First you build a theory, for example, by observation, expert interviews, and the like, and then you generate hypotheses to test the theory. Over time, some theories will stand the test of time and will be considered valid. Sadly, most software…

Researchers often use the term “qualitative research” to mean research without substantial empirical data, and use “quantitative research” to mean research with substantial empirical data. That doesn’t make sense to me, as most “qualitative researchers” will quickly point out, because qualitative research utilizes as much data in a structured way as it can. Everything else…

Some of my colleagues like to talk about how research that involves programming is “hard”, while research that involves human subjects is “soft”. Similarly, some colleagues like to call exploratory (qualitative) research “soft” and confirmatory (quantitative) research “hard”. Soft and hard are often used as synonyms for easy and difficult, and this is plain wrong.…

A short Twitter thread: Scientific research papers cite other research papers for related or prior knowledge they build on; they cite blog posts as primary material to work with in theory building; two very different things 1/4 A blog post needs to (a) properly use the scientific method and (b) be socially validated by peer…

I just attended FSE 2016, a leading academic conference on software engineering research. As is en vogue, it had a session on why so much software engineering research seems so removed from reality. One observation was that academics toil in areas of little interest to practice, publishing one incremental paper of little relevance after another.…