Everyone who develops software knows that it is a complex and risky business, and its participants are always on the lookout for new ideas that will lead to better software. Fortunately, software engineering is still a young and growing profession that sees innovations and improvements in best practices every year. Just look, for example, at the improvements and benefits that lean and agile thinking have brought to software-development teams. Successful software-development teams need to strike a balance between quickly delivering working software systems, satisfying their stakeholders, addressing their risks, and improving their ways of working. For that, they need an effective thinking framework that bridges the gap between their current ways of working and any new ideas they want to adopt. This article presents such a thinking framework in the form of an actionable kernel, which could benefit any team wishing to balance their risks and improve their way of working. INSPIRATION Work on the kernel, the essence of software engineering, was inspired by and is a direct response to the SEMAT (Software Engineering Methods and Theory) call for action (see figure 1). It is, in its own way, one small step toward redefining software engineering. SEMAT was founded in September 2009 by Ivar Jacobson, Bertrand Meyer, and Richard Soley, who felt the time had come to fundamentally change the way people work with software-development methods. 3,4,8 They wrote a call for action statement, which in a few lines identifies a number of critical problems, explains why there is a need to act, and suggests what needs to be done. The call for action is: Some areas of software engineering today suffer from immature practices. Specific problems include: • The prevalence of fads more typical of the fashion industry than an engineering discipline. • The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis. • The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified.

A thinking framework in the form of an actionable kernel.

Many academic disciplines have general theories, which apply across the discipline and underlie much of its research. Examples include the Big Bang theory (cosmology), Maxwell's equations (electrodynamics), the theories of the cell and evolution (biology), the theory of supply and demand (economics), and the general theory of crime (criminology). Software engineering, in contrast, has no widely-accepted general theory. Consequently, the SEMAT Initiative organized a workshop to encourage development of general theory in software engineering. Workshop participants reached broad consensus that software engineering would benefit from better theoretical foundations, which require diverse theoretical approaches, consensus on a primary dependent variable and better instrumentation and descriptive research.

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Essence can keep software development for the IoT from becoming unwieldy.