A critical examination of software science

Authors:
J. -L. Lassez;D. Van Der Knijff;J. Shepherd;C. Lassez
Affiliations:
University of Melbourne Australia;University of Melbourne Australia;University of Melbourne Australia;Footscray Institute of Technology Australia
Venue:
Journal of Systems and Software
Year:
1981

Citing 5
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Abstract

The claims that software science could provide an empirical basis for the rationalization of all forms of algorithm description are shown to be invalid from a formal point of view. In particular, the conjectured dichotomy between operators and operands is shown not to hold over a wide class of languages. An experiment that investigated discrepancies between the level measure and its estimator is described to show that its failure was due to shortcomings in the theory. One cannot obtain reliable results without tampering with both measure and estimator definitions.