Perspectives about paradigms in software engineering

Abstract. There is a broad use of the term “paradigm ” in Software Engineering. Concepts such as structured paradigm, cascade paradigm or agent-oriented paradigm are very frequent in software engineering research proposals. In this essay we distinguish between functional and scientific paradigm and we show that the common use of paradigm in Software Engineering is about the functional or engineering paradigm rather than scientific paradigm. We distinguish among four possible perspectives and, in this context, we sustain that the scientific perspective is intrinsic and hence very difficult to properly identify and describe. We argue that a discussion about the scientific paradigm in Software Engineering could help us to evaluate and improve the research practice in the discipline.