Resources for Software Engineering

Computers bring mathematical logic out into the big world. They got started in roughly the 1930's with Gödel, Turing, and Church making formal logic more precise by providing a mechanical model. Now formal logic has become a major global industry, contacting almost every facet of life, as the mechanical model has been incarnated as semiconductor circuitry, miniaturized and replicated through photolithography. The difficulties of creating a description of the world become more difficult to sweep under the rug when the mechanical system embodies such formal precision. The glitches in the description show up as computer systems that work poorly in practise.

Nathaniel S. Borenstein

Programming As If People Mattered : Friendly Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions An exploration of practical ways to manage the engineering process for more humanly beneficial results.

Software Development and Reality Construction

Proceedings of a conference held in 1988, published by Springer Verlag in 1992, edited by Christiane Floyd, Heinz Züllighoven, Reinhard Budde, and Reinhard Keil-Slawik. Contents:

"Human Questions in Computer Science", Christiane Floyd
"Learning from our Errors", Donald E. Knuth
"The Technical and the Human Side of Computer Science", Klaus-Peter Löhr
"Hermeneutics and Path", Joseph A. Goguen
"Computing: Yet Another Reality Construction", Rodney M. Burstall
"How Many Choices Do We Make? How Many Are Difficult?", Kristen Nygaard
"From Scientific Practise to Epistemological Discovery", Douglas T. Ross
"Self-Organization and Software Development", Heinz von Foerster and Christiane Floyd
"Software Development as Reality Construction", Christiane Floyd
"The Idea that Reality is Socially Constructed", Bo Dahlbom
"Scientific Expertise as a Social Process", Klaus Amaan
"How to Communicate Proofs or Programs", Dirk Siefkes
"Making Errors, Making Sense, Making Use", John M. Carroll
"Artifacts in Software Design", Reinhard Keil-Slawik
"The Denial of Error", Joseph A. Goguen
"Toward a New Understanding of Data Modelling", Heinz K. Klein and Kalle Lyytinen
"A Reappraisal of Information Science", Pentti Kerola and Jouni Similä
"Perspectives and Metaphors for Human-Computer Interaction", Susanne Maass and Horst Oberquelle
"Sortware Tools in a Programming Workshop", Reinhard Budde and Heinz Züllighoven
""Soft Engines - Mass-Produced Software for Working People?", Wolfgang Coy
"Artificial Intelligence: A Hermeneutic Defense", Thomas F. Gordon
"Shared Responsibility: A Field of Tension", Gro Bjerknes
"A Subject-Oriented Approach to Information Systems", Markku I. Nurminen
"Anticipating Reality Construction", Fanny-Michaela Reisin
"On Controllability", Wolfgang Dzida
"Work Design for Human Development", Walter Volpert
"Truth and Meaning Beyond Formalism", Joseph A. Goguen
"Informatics and Hermeneutics", Rafael Capurro
"Language and Software, or: Fritzl's Quest", Dafydd Gibbon
"Activity Theory as a Foundation for Design", Arne Raeithel
"Reflections on the Essence of Information", Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski

Joseph Goguen

From "The Denial of Error," in Software Development and Reality Construction , pp 193-202:: This paper claims that the modern world has developed a kind of arrogance which is damaging the very projects that it seeks to sustain: in proposing methodoligies to guarantee the absence of error, we deny the incredible richness of our own experience, in which confusion and error are often the seeds of creation; in this way, we limit our own creativity. [p] This arrogance is not an isolated phenomenon that is found only in computer science. Indeed, I claim that it arises in a natural way from our preoccupation with and immersion in science and technology, which are strongly oriented toward control. ... A software development project is not primarily a formal mathematical entity. Perhaps it is best seen as a dialogical or linguistic process, an evolving organization of certain informational structures, continually recreating itself by building, modifying, and reusing these structures. ... Important avenues for further progress in Software Engineering seem to be blocked by our inadequate understanding of the processes involved in developing software systems. ... Although formal methods can be very powerful when they are properly applied, they also have definite limitations, and formal, rationalistic understanding is only one of many approaches to understanding. Intuition and spiritual understanding are alternatives that seem more important in certain ways.

William Kent

Data and Reality: Basic Assumptions in Data Processing Reconsidered. (North-Holland 1978)

from page 9:
We seem to have little difficulty with the concept of "one person" despite changes in appearance, personality, capabilities, and, above all, chemical composition. (The proportions and structure - i.e., the chemical formulas - may not change much, but the individual atoms and melecules are continually being replaced... again illustrating an ambiguity between "same kind" and "same instance": how rapidly is the chemical composition of your body changing?) When we speak of the same person over a period of time, we certainly are not referring to the same ensemble of atoms and molecules. What then is the "same person"? We can only appeal to some vague intuition obout the "continuity" of - something - through gradual change. The concept of "same person" is so familiar and obvious that it is absolutely irritating no to be able to define it. Definitions in terms of "soul" and "spirit" may be the only true and humanisitic concepts, but, significantly, we don't know how to deal with them in a computer-based information system. It is only when the notion of "person" is pushed to some limit do we realize how imprecise the notion is.
from p. 203:
In an absolute sense, there is no singular objective reality. But we can share a common enough view of it for most of our working purposes, so that reality does appear to be objective and stable.
But the chances of acieving such a shared view become poorer when we try to encompass broader purposes, and to involve more people. This is precisely why the question is becoming more relevant today: the thrust of technology is to foster interaction among greater numbers of people, and to integrate processes into monoliths serving wider and wider purposes. It is in this environment that discrepencies in fundamental assumputions will become increasingly exposed.

Jaron Lanier

ONE HALF OF A MANIFESTO
- "There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived inside the confines of a theory."

Research Methods in Information Systems

Proceedings of colloquium held in 1984 titled, "Information Systems Research: a doubtful science?", edited by Enid Mumford, Rudi Hirschheim, Guy Fitzgerald, and Trevor Wood-Harper, published by Elsevier in 1985. Contents:

"Information Systems Research Methodology: An Introduction to the Debate", G. Fitzgerald, R. A. Hirschheim, E. Mumford and A. T. Wood-Harper
"Information Systems Epistemology: An Historical Perspective", Rudi Hirschheim
"Acquiring Knowledge of Information Systems - Research in a Methodological Quagmire", Hans-Erik Nissen
"Contextualist Research and the Study of Organizational Change Processes", Andrew M. Pettigrew
"Socio-Technical Design, Trade Union Strategies and Action Research", Ake Sandberg
"Research Methodologies and MIS Research", A. Milton Jenkins
"Development, Application and Enrichment of STROBE: Refinement of an Observational Tool for the Information Analyst", Kenneth Kendall and Julie Kendall
"The Poverty of Scientism in Information Systems", Heinz K. Klein and Kalle Lyytinen
"Research Methods in Information Systems: Using Action Research", Trevor Wood-Harper
"Phenomenology: A Preferred Approach to Research on Information Systems", Richard J. Boland, Jr.
"Selection of a Research Method", Lyn Antill
"The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas as a Basis for a Theory of Information Systems", Kalle Lyytinen and Heinz K. Klein
""Perception and Deceptions: Issues for Information Systems Research", Kathy Brittain White
"The Need for Longitudinal Designs in the Study of Computing Environments", Nicholas P. Vitalari
"In Search of a Paradigm for Information Systems Research", Robert D. Galliers
"Two Research Methodologies for Studying User Development of Data Systems", Per Flensburg
"Research People Problems: Some Advice to a Student", Enid Mumford

Brian Cantwell Smith

On the Origin of Objects, MIT Press 1996.

from p. vii-viii:
Having spent more than twenty-five years working in the trenches of practicing computer science, in a long-term effort to develop an empirically responsible theory of computation, I had never met such a logically pure entity, never met such a lapidary individual thing.
from p. 3:
This book introduces a new metaphysics - a philosophy of presence - that aims to steer a path between the Scylla of naive realism and the Charybdis of pure constructivism. The goal is to develop an integral account that retains the essential humility underlying each tradition: a form of epistemic deference to the world that underlies realism, and a respect for the constitutive human involvement in the world that underwrites constructivism. The proposal is also intended to be neutral with respoect to (a late twentieth-century update of) C. P. Snow's famous two culutres - serving equally as a foundation for the academic, intellectual, and technological, on the one hand, and for the curious, the moral, the erotic, the political, the artistic, and the sheerly obstreperous, on the other.
from pp. 288-289
Objects are not stabilized only through acts of disconnected focusing, in other words. Nor are they stabilized merely in virtue of their own integrity or achievement, or even of the two phenomena together. They are also stabilized by force, through the travails of those who register them. And not solely through the efforts of individuals, or even institutions, but with the full complicity of the surrounding community of practice.

Gerald M. Weinberg

Practical insights into managing systems engineering.

Quality Software Management in four volumes:
1. Systems Thinking
2. First-Order Measurement
3. Congruent Action
4. Anticipating Change
Exploring Requirements : Quality Before Design coauthored by Donald Gause.
On the Design of Stable Systems, (Wiley 1979) coauthored by Daniela Weinberg.

from pp. 67-69:
Now we can see what really "distinguishes [physics and chemistry] from biology." There is nothing "inherent" or "legitimate" in their use of statistics - that is, in their use of means or of types. In nature, we very rarely find a bar of pure gold or a solution of pure glucose. In fact, we very rarely find "pure" undifferentiated anything, since purity is one of those observer's fictions. The physicist has to work very, very hard to get her "pure" gold, and even then she will have a mixture of isotopes, unless she works very much harder.
The reason we don't speak of "physical variation" is that the physicist has chosen not to work with naturally occurring systems, but, rather, with the products of her laboratory. Most of her time in that laboratory is spent eliminating the variation and keeping it eliminated. Moreover, she must artificially ensure the survival of each aggregate, for a lump of pure gold, and especially a solution of pure glucose, would not survive long without the active participation of the scientist.
...
The reductionist - interested in "law" - emphasizes the sameness; the antireductionist - interested in "life" - emphasizes the difference. If the reductionist goes to the extreme, his laws are about systems that have zero probability of being observed; while if the antireductionist goes to his extreme, his systems also have zero probability of being observed - for if a system is truly unique, our minds cannot deal with it at all. In the first case the system does not exist, while in the second we have no way of observing its existence.
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

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