Research in Software Engineering Paradigms and Methods - Key Points

Software engineering is new to the research field due to its different:

• Research methods.
• Validation methods.

The main focus of this papers is in the identification of research problems in software engineering. Research problems in software engineering can be classified into 2 categories:

Scientific Nature	Engineering Nature
Consist of different objects of study	Problem of building new software from existing  artifacts
Focus is on the theoretical aspects of Software  engineering	Its focus is on the artificial aspects
It is not just the actual but also the knowledge	It is not just the application but also the  knowledge
Example: What things are like?	Example: What things should be like to create  new?

Software engineering and computer science had been considered as a single field till the early 1980's which led to the immaturity of the software engineering research field. This immaturity had been verified as a result of the detected deficiencies in its research i.e. :

• Systematic rigorous methods.
• Lack of evident methods of research result validations.

Software engineering is a combination of two types of studies:

Software engineering designs can be created from an old one or the existing software designs can be studied to analyze their use in the industry but the same cannot be applied to software engineering tools as even after the creation of new tools, it is the old ones that are still tested. In this case, the development of the software engineering design is an empirical or a socio-cultural problem where as the later is the engineering problem. The justification of software engineering research had been conducted via:

The use of the research methods and paradigms depends on the nature of the research being conducted. The method required to solve engineering problems itself is becoming a research field.