RPSE: Reification as Paradigm of Software Engineering
This work addresses a foundational problem for software engineering researchers and practitioners by offering a new theoretical framework, though it appears incremental in its conceptual approach.
The paper tackles the problem of defining a foundational paradigm for software engineering by proposing RPSE, which conceptualizes software engineering as the reification of mental models into code, aiming to optimize development processes, cost, and quality through model chain construction.
The paper introduces RPSE, Reification as a Paradigm of Software Engineering, and enumerates the most important theoretical and practical problems of the development and application of this paradigm. Main thesis: Software engineering is the reification (materialization of ideas) via the transformation of mental models into code executed on computers . Within the proposed paradigm: 1.All basic processes of software engineering are concrete variants (implementations) of the process of constructing chains of mental and material models I1, I2,..In, M1, M2, ..Mm. The last most specific model in this chain is, as a rule, program code. 2.The essence of software engineering is the construction of such chains. 3.All main issues of optimizing the development, its cost, and quality can be reduced to the optimization of construction of the corresponding chain of models.