Invited lecture : Notions of ‘theory’ and their practical consequences in the discipline of software ‘engineering’ (including information systems design)

Abstract

In the context of the AISSAC seminar on information systems, to which this invited lecture was given, it is presumed throughout the following considerations that: • contemporary information systems are software systems, whereas traditional libraries of printed books (which are indeed pre-electronic information systems) are not considered here; • design and development of information systems (from capturing the initial requirements to implementation and deployment) are software engineering activities; • it is therefore justified to speak about ‘software engineering’ (rather than about ‘information systems’) throughout this lecture, • whereby the notion of ‘information’ is assumed to be already ‘basically understood’ (and is thus not subject to further science-philosophical definitions or critique in this contribution). Some background literature on these preliminaries is already available (Gruner, 2016; Gruner & Kroeze, 2014). Moreover: a small ‘sub set’ of the considerations, which are elaborated in much detail in the following sections, had already been briefly discussed on another occasion (Gruner, 2019). My new insights and ‘lessons learned’ from that previous discussion, as well as those ones from the most recent AISSAC seminar itself, are of course ‘integrated’ into this contribution.