Is Software Engineering Research Addressing Software Engineering Problems? (Keynote)

Brian Randell described software engineering as “the multi-person development of multi-version programs”. David Parnas expressed that this “pithy phrase implies everything that differentiates software engineering from other programming” (Parnas, 2011). How does current software engineering research compare against this definition? Is there too much focus currently on research into problems and techniques more associated with programming than software engineering? Are there opportunities to use Randell's description of software engineering to guide the community to new research directions? In this extended abstract, I motivate the keynote, which explores these questions and discusses how a consideration of the development streams used by multiple individuals to produce multiple versions of software opens up new avenues for impactful software engineering research.