Editor's corner: Structured research? (A partly tongue-in-cheek look)
There is a problem hardly anyone wants to talk about, but I think it’s time to bring it out into the open. It’s what I’d like to call the “software research crisis.” The software research crisis? What is this crisis, I hear you saying? It’s the tendency of research to be over budget, behind schedule and unreliable. And it’s a real crisis. When did you last hear of a research project that worked to a tightly-controlled budget, came through on a predictable schedule, and was reliable enough to be put to immediate, productive use? I am not here just to bemoan this crisis. I have some positive suggestions as to what we should do about it. First of all, I think it is time we structure our research. In fact, I would like to propose a structured revolution for research. What do I mean by structured research? We need a disciplined, rigorous, orderly, straightforward process for doing research. None of these random opportunistic “goto’s. ” None of that slovenly, uncontrolled, freedom-loving serendipitous stuff out of the past. We will have a research life cycle, carefully-controlled milestones for monitoring research accomplishments, and a set of research documents to be produced along the way so that management can see into research progress. And research metrics. We need ways of measuring both the productivity and the success of research projects [perhaps we could measure person-hours per Source Line Of Published research paper (SLOP)]. To compare future research under this new paradigm with the undisciplined research of the past, we’d better begin collecting this metric data now. Contemporary research metrics data collection is perhaps the most urgent need of the research crisis. And then we need to define research process. Perhaps we could even define a research process model, and invent a process language in which we could define the activities of research and monitor a specific project against that model.