A Unifying Theoretical Foundation for Software Engineering

The goal of this keynote paper is to argue for a unifying theoretical foundation for software engineering. I believe that one of the reasons for our lack of rigor compared to physical and behavioral sciences is that we have not given enough attention to the theories that underpin our work, both as software engineers and as software engineering researchers. I present my general theory about software engineering and then propose two simple theories, D and E as the basis for laying out a unified theoretical foundation for software engineering and software engineering research. Software Engineering consists of two logical parts: design and empirical evaluation (both terms used in their broadest senses). I propose theory D to as the theoretical basis for the design part, and theory E as the theoretical basis for empirical evaluation. These two theories are then composed in various ways to lay out a space (a taxonomy, or ontology if you will) for software engineering. Finally, I claim that software engineering and software engineering research (both fully integrated with empirical evaluations) are models for the atomic and composed theories.