This paper takes part in the methodological debate concerning the nature and the justification of hypotheses about computational systems in software engineering by providing an epistemological analysis of Software Testing, the practice of observing the programs’ executions to examine whether they fulfil software requirements. Property specifications articulating such requirements are shown to involve falsifiable hypotheses about software systems that are evaluated by means of tests which are likely to falsify those hypotheses. Software Reliability metrics, used to measure the growth of (...) probability that given failures will occur at specified times as new executions are observed, is shown to involve a Bayesian confirmation of falsifiable hypotheses on programs. Coverage criteria, used to select those input values with which the system under test is to be launched, are understood as theory-laden principles guiding software tests, here compared to scientific experiments. Redundant computations, fault seeding models and formal methods used in software engineering to evaluate test results are taken to be instantiations of some epistemological strategies used in scientific experiments to distinguish between valid and non-valid experimental outcomes. The final part of the paper explores the problem, advanced in the context of the philosophy of technology, of defining the epistemological status of software engineering by conceiving it as a scientifically attested technology. (shrink)

Large part of contemporary science is in fact technoscience, in the sense that it crucially depends on several technologies for the generation, collection, and analysis of data. This prompts a re-examination of the relations between science and technologies. In this essay, I advance the view that we’d better move beyond the ‘subordination view’ and the ‘instrumental’ view. The first aims to establish the primacy of science over technology, and the second uses technology instrumentally to support a realist position about theoretical (...) entities. I suggest that we should instead concentrate on how science and technology interact. This will reveal that technology has a poietic character, namely it actively partakes in the production of knowledge. But this poietic character can only be understood within the cognitive activity of scientific communities. Current research in molecular epidemiology, notably the projects funded within the ‘European exposome initiative’, serves as a motivation for such discussion and as an illustration of the claims made. (shrink)