Theory based software engineering with the SEMAT kernel: preliminary investigation and experiences
Pan-Wei Ng · 2014
This paper proposes an approach towards Theory Based Software Engineering (TBSE) that makes use of Essence as an underlying foundation. This proposed TBSE approach originated from our engagement to help transform a 4000 person IT organization from traditional development towards lean and agile development. Central to TBSE is describing the context of a software engineering endeavors through architecture views, and contextualizing general theories of software engineering into specific ones to recommend theoretically sound practices for process improvement. These practices create changes in existing software engineering endeavors, the results of which are used to validate and tune the specific theories. This in turn provides feedback to the general theories. The value of Essence comes by providing a structure for analyzing and organizing the context and factors of software engineering endeavors from different dimensions, namely: Stakeholders, Opportunity, Requirements, Software System, Work, Team and Way of Working. To demonstrate the viability of our proposed approach, this paper exemplifies TBSE on the Stakeholders’ dimension.