IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/tjorxx/v73y2022i4p693-715.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Beyond Hard and Soft OR: operational research from a software engineering perspective

Author

Listed:
  • Melina Vidoni

Abstract

This paper argues that current practice in the Operational Research (OR) discipline needs to tackle management problems from a broader point of view by including a new perspective. While Hard OR is posed as the means to a solution, and Soft OR covers the stakeholder/business perspective, this paper proposes OR Engineering to tackle the model/program perspective. This proposal is substantiated by an empirical study that explored OR history and the rise of “wicked problems” in contrast to Software Engineering (SE) history and the idea of “no silver bullet”. The main findings are five areas for future works, intertwined between Soft OR and OR Engineering: agility, documentation of versioning, technical debt, systems testing and architecture. Overall, although the goal may be ambitious, this paper aims to stimulate reflective thinking and promote a novel and different line of action and research among OR and SE practitioners present and future.

Suggested Citation

  • Melina Vidoni, 2022. "Beyond Hard and Soft OR: operational research from a software engineering perspective," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 73(4), pages 693-715, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:73:y:2022:i:4:p:693-715
    DOI: 10.1080/01605682.2020.1865848
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01605682.2020.1865848
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/01605682.2020.1865848?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:tjorxx:v:73:y:2022:i:4:p:693-715. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/tjor .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.