research-article

Faith, hope, and love: an essay on software science's neglect of human factors

Author:

Stefan HanenbergAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 45, Issue 10

Pages 933 - 946

https://doi.org/10.1145/1932682.1869536

Published: 17 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Research in the area of programming languages has different facets -- from formal reasoning about new programming language constructs (such as type soundness proofs for new type systems) over inventions of new abstractions, up to performance measurements of virtual machines. A closer look into the underlying research methods reveals a distressing characteristic of programming language research: developers, which are the main audience for new language constructs, are hardly considered in the research process. As a consequence, it is simply not possible to state whether a new construct that requires some kind of interaction with the developer has any positive impact on the construction of software. This paper argues for appropriate research methods in programming language research that rely on studies of developers -- and argues that the introduction of corresponding empirical methods not only requires a new understanding of research but also a different view on how to teach software science to students.

References

[1]

}}Bartsch, M., and Harrison, R. An exploratory study of the effect of aspect-oriented programming on maintainability. Software Quality Control 16, 1 (2008), 23--44.

Digital Library

[2]

}}Basili, V. R. The role of experimentation in software engineering: past, current, and future. In ICSE ’96: Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Software engineering (Washington, DC, USA, 1996), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 442--449.

Digital Library

[3]

}}Basili, V. R., Selby, R. W., and Hutchens, D. H. Experimentation in software engineering. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 12, 7 (1986), 733--743.

Digital Library

[4]

}}Blackburn, S. M., Garner, R., Hoffmann, C., Khang, A. M., McKinley, K. S., Bentzur, R., Diwan, A., Feinberg, D., Frampton, D., Guyer, S. Z., Hirzel, M., Hosking, A., Jump, M., Lee, H., Moss, J. E. B., Moss, B., Phansalkar, A., Stefanovi, D., VanDrunen, T., von Dincklage, D., and Wiedermann, B. The DaCapo benchmarks: Java benchmarking development and analysis. In OOPSLA ’06: Proceedings of the 21st annual ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (New York, NY, USA, 2006), ACM, pp. 169--190.

Digital Library

[5]

}}Boehm, B., Boehm, B., Clark, B., Horowitz, E., Westl, C., Madachy, R., and Selby, R. Cost models for future software life cycle processes:. In Annals of Software Engineering (1995), pp. 57--94.

[6]

}}Bortz, J., and Döring, N. Forschungsmethoden und Evaluation: für Human- und Sozialwissenschaftler, 4. ed. Springer, Heidelberg, 2006.

[7]

}}Denning, P. J. Is computer science science? Commun. ACM 48, 4 (2005), 27--31.

Digital Library

[8]

}}Dijkstra, E. W. The humble programmer. Commun. ACM 15, 10 (1972), 859--866.

Digital Library

[9]

}}Dijkstra, E. W. A Discipline of Programming. Prentice Hall, Inc., October 1976.

Digital Library

[10]

}}Easterbrook, S. M., Singer, J., Storey, M., and Damian, D. Selecting empirical methods for software engineering research. In Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering, F. Shull, J. Singer, and D. Sjøberg, Eds. Springer, 2007.

[11]

}}Endres, A., and Rombach, D. A Handbook of Software and Systems Engineering. Pearson Addison-Wesley, 2003.

[12]

}}Fenton, N. E., and Pfleeger, S. L. Software Metrics: A Rigorous and Practical Approach. PWS Publishing Co., Boston, MA, USA, 1998.

Digital Library

[13]

}}Filman, R. E., Elrad, T., Clarke, S., and Ak\c sit, M., Eds. Aspect-Oriented Software Development. Addison-Wesley, Boston, 2005.

Digital Library

[14]

}}Fitts, P. M. The information capacity of the human motor system in controlling the amplitude of movement. Journal of Experimental Psychology 47, 6 (June 1954), 262--269.

[15]

}}Génova, G. Is computer science truly scientific? Commun. ACM 53, 7 (2010), 37--39.

Digital Library

[16]

}}Halstead, M. H. Elements of Software Science (Operating and programming systems series). Elsevier Science Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1977.\\

Digital Library

[17]

}}Hick, W. E. On the rate of gain of information. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 4, 1 (1952), 11--26.

[18]

}}Johnson, R. E. Documenting frameworks using patterns. In OOPSLA ’92: Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages, and applications (New York, NY, USA, 1992), ACM, pp. 63--76.

Digital Library

[19]

}}Juristo, N., and Moreno, A. M. Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation. Springer, 2001.

Digital Library

[20]

}}Kitchenham, B., Al-Khilidar, H., Babar, M. A., Berry, M., Cox, K., Keung, J., Kurniawati, F., Staples, M., Zhang, H., and Zhu, L. Evaluating guidelines for empirical software engineering studies. In ISESE ’06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering (New York, NY, USA, 2006), ACM, pp. 38--47.

Digital Library

[21]

}}Madsen, O. L., and Møller-Pedersen, B. What object-oriented programming may be - and what it does not have to be. In Proceedings of European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP’88) (1988), Springer, pp. 1--20.

Digital Library

[22]

}}National Research Council. Computer Science: Reflections on the Field, Reflections from the Field. National Academy Press, 2004.

[23]

}}Pfleeger, S. L. Soup or art? the role of evidential force in empirical software engineering. IEEE Software 22 (2005), 66--73.

Digital Library

[24]

}}Popper, K. In Logik der Forschung (2007), H. Keuth, Ed., Akademie Verlag GmbH.

[25]

}}Prechelt, L. Kontrollierte Experimente in der Softwaretechnik. Springer, Berlin, March 2001.

[26]

}}Prechelt, L., Unger, B., and Tichy, W. Two controlled experiments assessing the usefulness of design pattern documentation in program maintenance. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 28 (2002), 595--606.

Digital Library

[27]

}}Sheil, B. A. The psychological study of programming. ACM Comput. Surv. 13, 1 (1981), 101--120.

Digital Library

[28]

}}Shneiderman, B. Software Psychology: Human Factors in Computer and Information Systems. Winthrop Publishers, August 1980.

Digital Library

[29]

}}Shneiderman, B., and Plaisant, C. Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, 5. ed. Pearson Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2009.

Digital Library

[30]

}}Sjøberg, D. I. K., Dyba, T., and Jørgensen, M. The future of empirical methods in software engineering research. In FOSE ’07: 2007 Future of Software Engineering (Washington, DC, USA, 2007), IEEE Computer Society, pp. 358--378.

Digital Library

[31]

}}Sjøberg, D. I. K., Hannay, J. E., Hansen, O., By Kampenes, V., Karahasanović, A., Liborg, N.-K., and C. Rekdal, A. A survey of controlled experiments in software engineering. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. 31, 9 (2005), 733--753.

Digital Library

[32]

}}Snelting, G. Paul Feyerabend und die Softwaretechnologie. Informatik-Spektrum 21, 5 (October 1998), 273--276.

[33]

}}Snelting, G. Feyerabend - zwei Jahre sp\"ater. Softwaretechnik-Trends 21, 1 (February 2001), 40--43.

[34]

}}Sommerville, I. Software Engineering, 9. ed. Addison-Wesley, Harlow, England, 2010.

Digital Library

[35]

}}Tichy, W. F. Die Bedeutung der Empirie für die Softwaretechnik. Keynote at German Conference on Software Engineering, Essen, March, 8--11, 2005.

[36]

}}Tichy, W. F. Should computer scientists experiment more? IEEE Computer 31 (1998), 32--40.

Digital Library

[37]

}}Tichy, W. F., Lukowicz, P., Prechelt, L., and Heinz, E. A. Experimental evaluation in computer science: A quantitative study. Journal of Systems and Software 28, 1 (1995), 9--18.

Digital Library

[38]

}}Ungar, D., and Smith, R. B. Self: The power of simplicity. In OOPSLA ’87: Conference proceedings on Object-oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications (December 1987), ACM, pp. 227--242.

Digital Library

[39]

}}Weinberg, G. M. The Psychology of Computer Programming. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 1985.

Digital Library

[40]

}}Wilkinson, L., and the Task Force on Statistical Inference. Statistical methods in psychology journals: Guidelines and explanations. American Psychologist 54 (1999), 594--604.

[41]

}}Wohlin, C., Runeson, P., Höst, M., Ohlsson, M. C., Regnell, B., and Wesslén, A. Experimentation in software engineering: an introduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell, MA, USA, 2000.

Digital Library

[42]

}}Zelkowitz, M. V., and Wallace, D. R. Experimental models for validating technology. Computer 31 (1998), 23--31.

Digital Library

Cited By

Hanenberg SMehlhorn N(2021)Two N-of-1 self-trials on readability differences between anonymous inner classes (AICs) and lambda expressions (LEs) on Java code snippetsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10077-327:2Online publication date: 20-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10077-3
Weilemann EBrune P(2020)The Influence of Personality on Software Quality – A Systematic Literature ReviewTrends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_75(766-777)Online publication date: 18-May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_75
Kaijanaho ATorlak EStorm TBiddle R(2017)Concept analysis in programming language research: done well it is all rightProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3133850.3133868(246-259)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133850.3133868
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Faith, hope, and love: an essay on software science's neglect of human factors
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages

Recommendations

Faith, hope, and love: an essay on software science's neglect of human factors
OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications

Research in the area of programming languages has different facets -- from formal reasoning about new programming language constructs (such as type soundness proofs for new type systems) over inventions of new abstractions, up to performance ...
Ethical Issues in Software Engineering Research: A Survey of Current Practice

In this paper we explore how the software engineering research community is currently dealing with the ethical issues that some empirical research presents. We discuss how the immaturity of the software engineering discipline is reflected in an approach ...
Point/Counterpoint

Is software engineering suffering from a lack of sound empirical research? "In Empirical Research in Software Engineering: A Critical View," David Lorge Parnas (Middle Road Software) debates this issue with Bill Curtis (Cast Software) who writes "Are ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 45, Issue 10

OOPSLA '10

October 2010

957 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1932682

Issue’s Table of Contents

OOPSLA '10: Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
October 2010
984 pages
ISBN:9781450302036
DOI:10.1145/1869459
General Chairs:
William R. Cook
University of Texas at Austin
,
Siobhán Clarke
Trinity College Dublin
,
Program Chairs:
Martin Rinard
MIT
,
Kevin J. Sullivan
University of Virginia
,
Daniel H. Steinberg
Dim Sum Thinking Inc.

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2010

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 45, Issue 10

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

42
Total Citations
View Citations
931
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)17
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 09 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Hanenberg SMehlhorn N(2021)Two N-of-1 self-trials on readability differences between anonymous inner classes (AICs) and lambda expressions (LEs) on Java code snippetsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-021-10077-327:2Online publication date: 20-Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-10077-3
Weilemann EBrune P(2020)The Influence of Personality on Software Quality – A Systematic Literature ReviewTrends and Innovations in Information Systems and Technologies10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_75(766-777)Online publication date: 18-May-2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45688-7_75
Kaijanaho ATorlak EStorm TBiddle R(2017)Concept analysis in programming language research: done well it is all rightProceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGPLAN International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software10.1145/3133850.3133868(246-259)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2017
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3133850.3133868
Noughi NHanenberg SCleve A(2017)An Empirical Study on the Usage of SQL Execution Traces for Program Comprehension2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C.2017.17(47-54)Online publication date: Jul-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS-C.2017.17
Miller GAldrich JEugster P(2015)The spreadsheet paradigm: a basis for powerful and accessible programmingCompanion Proceedings of the 2015 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity10.1145/2814189.2814201(33-35)Online publication date: 25-Oct-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2814189.2814201
Feitelson D(2015)From Repeatability to Reproducibility and CorroborationACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/2723872.272387549:1(3-11)Online publication date: 20-Jan-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2723872.2723875
Hansen MLumsdaine AGoldstone RLeavens GEdwards J(2012)Cognitive architecturesProceedings of the ACM international symposium on New ideas, new paradigms, and reflections on programming and software10.1145/2384592.2384596(27-38)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2384592.2384596
Hanenberg S(2010)An experiment about static and dynamic type systemsACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1932682.186946245:10(22-35)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1932682.1869462
Moy CBelyakova JTurcotte ABartolomeo SDunne C(2020)Just TYPEical: Visualizing Common Function Type Signatures in R2020 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS)10.1109/VIS47514.2020.00031(121-125)Online publication date: Oct-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/VIS47514.2020.00031
Hatziapostolou TDranidis DSotiriadou AKefalas PNikolakopoulos IPolycarpou IRead JAndreou PArmoni M(2018)An authentic student research experience: fostering research skills and boosting the employability profile of studentsProceedings of the 23rd Annual ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/3197091.3197131(254-259)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3197091.3197131
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Issue’s Table of Contents