Principles should underlie standards and best practices

This position paper addresses the fourth issue submitted to the panel members: the identification of roles for national and international bodies and what actions should they undertake to advance "best practices" in software engineering. In the fifty-odd-year history of software, various methods and techniques, methodologies and tools have been proposed to facilitate the development and maintenance of software responsive to needs. Most have proved to be more specific to the then current state of technology than was understood at the time. As a result, many have subsequently been shown to be less universally applicable than originally intended. Despite a plethora of conferences and workshops over recent decades, and numerous periodicals, books and courses, software engineering continues to lack a set of universally recognised fundamental principles. Indeed, relatively few researchers have pursued this important subject in comparison with other research tracks in software engineering.