RPSE: Reification as Paradigm of Software Engineering

TL;DR

This paper proposes RPSE, a paradigm viewing software engineering as the process of reifying mental models into executable code, emphasizing the construction and optimization of chains of models.

Contribution

It introduces a novel paradigm that conceptualizes software engineering as reification of mental models into concrete implementations, unifying processes under this framework.

Findings

Software engineering is reification of ideas into code.

Main processes are chains of mental and material models.

Optimization focuses on constructing and refining model chains.

Abstract

The paper introduces RPSE, Reification as a Paradigm of Software Engineering, and enumerates the most important theoretical and practical problems of the development and application of this paradigm. Main thesis: Software engineering is the reification (materialization of ideas) via the transformation of mental models into code executed on computers . Within the proposed paradigm: 1.All basic processes of software engineering are concrete variants (implementations) of the process of constructing chains of mental and material models I1, I2,..In, M1, M2, ..Mm. The last most specific model in this chain is, as a rule, program code. 2.The essence of software engineering is the construction of such chains. 3.All main issues of optimizing the development, its cost, and quality can be reduced to the optimization of construction of the corresponding chain of models.