Progress Report on a Proposed Theory for Software Development
This addresses the need for a unified framework in software engineering to reconcile conflicting methodologies, but it is incremental as it builds on existing ideas without presenting new empirical results.
The authors propose a theory to integrate diverse software development methodologies, aiming to enhance predictability of outcomes by providing an overarching model for categorizing and understanding software initiatives.
There is growing acknowledgement within the software engineering community that a theory of software development is needed to integrate the myriad methodologies that are currently popular, some of which are based on opposing perspectives. We have been developing such a theory for a number of years. In this position paper, we overview our theory along with progress made thus far. We suggest that, once fully developed, this theory, or one similar to it, may be applied to support situated software development, by providing an overarching model within which software initiatives might be categorised and understood. Such understanding would inevitably lead to greater predictability with respect to outcomes.