Software engineering suffers from the beehive syndrome

Despite its age of almost half a century, software engineering is not yet mature enough. It still suffers from enormous gaps in the knowledge and understanding of software lifecycle processes and their reciprocal interplay and impact on each other. The gaps will stay with us if we do not put enough effort and resources into decreasing and/or removing them. This paper claims that the software community should pull together and make the effort of organizing itself and defining and/or redefining software engineering based on a solid theory, proven principles and best practices. The software community should create a process roadmap. Such a roadmap should list the processes to be managed during the lifecycle, place them on the organizational levels, place them on the software lifecycle phases, identify their role within each organizational level and lifecycle phase, weigh their business criticality and rate their research urgency.