Redirections

A collection of articles from the IEEE Software's 'Redirections' column, edited by Tim Menzies.

The Redirections department, aims to focus on … surprises. After five decades of software engineering, it’s time to ask, “What’s surprising about software engineering?” We say this because there’s a growing list of SE “truths” that new data shows are wildly inaccurate.

This collections includes 11 articles published between 2018 and 2019.

(stats / articles)
(stats / downloads)
(top articles)




2019 (5)

2019
One-Click Formal Methods
IEEE Software 2019 (6); by J. Backes, P. Bolignano, B. Cook, A. Gacek, K. S. Luckow, N. Rungta, M. Schaef, C. Schlesinger, R. Tanash, C. Varming, M. Whalen

Formal methods are mathematically based approaches for specifying, building, and reasoning about software.

2019
The End to the Myth of Individual Programmer Productivity
IEEE Software 2019 (5); by W. R. Nichols

One often-quoted truism in software engineering is that good programmers are "much much better" than bad programmers.

2019
Think Your Artificial Intelligence Software Is Fair? Think Again
IEEE Software 2019 (4); by R. K. E. Bellamy, K. Dey, M. Hind, S. C. Hoffman, S. Houde, K. Kannan, P. Lohia, S. Mehta, A. Mojsilovic, S. Nagar, K. N. Ramamurthy, J. Richards, D. Saha, P. Sattigeri, M. Singh, K. R. Varshney, Y. Zhang

Today, machine-learning software is used to help make decisions that affect people's lives.

2019
Is Your Software Valueless?
IEEE Software 2019 (3); by J. Whittle

Software development ignores human values. As a society, we rely on software systems that neither align with nor respect our core values, such as…

2019
Complexity: Let's Not Make This Complicated
IEEE Software 2019 (2); by A. Hindle

Examines the concept of "keeping it simple" with respect to software engineering.

2018 (6)

2018
Belief and Evidence: How Software Engineers Form Their Opinions
IEEE Software 2018 (6); by P. Devanbu, T. Zimmermann, C. Bird

A study at Microsoft revealed how developers opinions about software engineering truths can be subjectively based.Topics: evidence-based…

2018
Software Engineering’s Top Topics, Trends, and Researchers
IEEE Software 2018 (5); by G. Mathew, T. Menzies

For this theme issue on the 50th anniversary of software engineering SE, Redirections offers an overview of the twists, turns, and numerous redirections…

2018
What Do We (Really) Know about Test-Driven Development?
IEEE Software 2018 (4); by I. Karac, B. Turhan

Test-driven development TDD involves more than just testing before coding.

2018
Reconsidering Whether GOTO Is Harmful
IEEE Software 2018 (3); by M. Nagappan

Is it always bad to use GOTO statements An empirical analysis of open source C projects on GitHub suggests otherwise.Topics: Edsger…

2018
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Software Analytics
IEEE Software 2018 (2); by T. Menzies

In theory, software analytics shouldnt work because software project behavior shouldnt be predictable.

2018
From Voice of Evidence to Redirections
IEEE Software 2018 (1); by R. Prikladnicki, T. Menzies

The Voice of Experience department is being relaunched as Redirections, which will focus on the surprises in software engineering.Topics:…