RESUMEN

Evidence-based reasoning is becoming common in many fields. It's widely enshrined in the practice and teaching of medicine, law, and management, for example. Evidence-based approaches demand that, among other things, practitioners systematically track down the best evidence relating to some practice; critically appraise that evidence for validity, impact, and applicability; and carefully document it. One proponent of evidence-based software engineering is David Budgen of Durham University. In the Internet age, he argues, many sources of supposed knowledge--Google, Wikipedia, digg.com, and so on--surround us. At his keynote address at the 2006 Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training, Budgen asks, how should we train students to assess all that information and to separate the sense from the nonsense? In his view, before we can denounce some inaccuracy in, say, Wikipedia, we must first look to our own work and audit our own results.

RESUMEN

An interesting issue facing software engineering relates to the evidence for adopting new techniques, tools, languages methodologies, and so on. We shouldn't always reject new models based on pure argument and logic, but ideally, we should subject such developments to some form of validation. The software engineering community has addressed this issue in part by the establishment of specialist conferences. Two of these are merging, and the Technical Council on Software Engineering thought you would like to know why.