Modules and transactions: Building blocks for a theory of software engineering

Abstract

This article leverages the findings of the transaction cost economics field, and proposes a simple theory and associated vocabulary to serve as a foundation for a unified theory of software engineering. The theory characterizes software engineering as a set of transactions organized under a spectrum of three governance structures (top-down, bottom-up and reuse), and explains the strengths and weaknesses of these governance structures in relation to asset specificity and uncertainty. It takes into account the recursive nature of the notions in software engineering, and applies uniformly to various contexts at different levels of granularity. It sheds light both on the technical and on the human aspects of software engineering through a unified explanatory framework, without requiring a need to assemble different approaches to address each. The theory not only explains some of the propositions given in the software engineering literature but also reveals the boundaries of their applicability.

The Tarpit – A general theory of software engineering

“…authors, reviewers and program committee members for the GTSE workshop series [1][2][3] and associated special issues [4]), we find contributors with an engineering-oriented perspective [38][39][40][41][42][43] as well as participants influenced by the social sciences (typically via the information systems discipline) [44][45][46][47][48]. This broad community seems to contain also differing views on epistemology.…”

“…A number of relevant articles were published in these fora, including theoretical proposals by Ralph [46,169], Perry [39,170], Adolph and Kruchten [47], Erbas and Erbas [43,171] and Smolander and Päivärinta [44,172]. Another recent addition to the stream of publications on software engineering theory is an article by Dieter Rombach, also published in 2013 [5].…”

Introduction to the special section—General Theories of Software Engineering: New advances and implications for research

“…We hope these articles inspire others to consider how their future studies can benefit and contribute to a theory-oriented software engineering. Besides the theories proposed in these articles, several other theories or theoretical frameworks have been published in the first special issue on the GTSE theme [17,18,19]. Together, these proposed theories offer various opportunities to explore how the extant software engineering literature can be integrated, for example:…”