Understanding the Importance of Non-Knowledge for Software Engineering on Social-Coding Platforms (INKleSS)

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Alena Bleicher; Professor Dr.-Ing. Jacob Krüger; Professor Dr.-Ing. Thomas Leich
• Subject Area: Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 536290508

Software engineering is concerned with the fundamentals and best practices of developing new software, including, for instance, the elicitation of requirements, design of architectures, testing, or version control. A particularly challenging aspect in software engineering are uncertainties that come with implementing, re-engineering, maintaining, updating, and enhancing essentially evolving an increasingly complex piece of software. Research in software engineering typically strives for developing solutions to better acquire knowledge. Within this project, our interdisciplinary team aims to approach the issue of knowledge-gaps in software engineering from a novel perspective: the angle of ignorance studies in social sciences. By applying this perspective to the context of software engineering we will carve out the diversity the phenomenon of non-knowledge has and factors that influence how non-knowledge is dealt with to finally build a model that explain the phenomenon. We will develop a semi-automated procedure that helps identifying different types of non-knowledge in developers’ (written) conversations and allows for developing strategies to systematically deal with non-knowledge (non-knowledge management) in software projects. Our research results and products will be evaluated with experts and practitioners in the field of software engineering.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants