Non-Knowledge as a New Lens on Software Engineering

Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive process. Consequently, researchers typically understand any lack of knowledge as a problem that must be mitigated by improving, for instance, program comprehension, reverse engineering, community collaboration, or documentation. However, a lack of knowledge may not always be a problem. In fact, research in the field of ignorance studies has highlighted the diversity of ignorance phenomena and emphasized their relevance in social interaction. We argue that focusing on non-knowledge as one of these phenomena can also be useful for software-engineering research. In this paper, we develop and substantiate this claim by providing a brief overview on the (social scientific) research on ignorance and by proposing a working definition of non-knowledge for software-engineering research. Then, we sketch how the perspective of non-knowledge as a social phenomenon can benefit future research within software engineering and propose three concrete directions to investigate. We envision that non-knowledge contributes a new lens to manage the complexity of intellectual capital and knowledge in modern software engineering. With this paper, we hope to motivate and guide future software-engineering research in this direction.