Establishing the fundamentals of software engineering

Abstract

There is a crippling lack of agreement as to what constitutes the fundamental techniques of Software Engineering. In industry, there is little use of explicitly defined methods. Academic proposals, though promising, have seen little industrial use and evaluation. Pilot projects in industry can help establish the fundamentals by showing which techniques are effective in various situations. The critical question is: how should these projects be organized and instrumented so that the results are convincing and widely applicable?