  Background: Philosophers of science including Collins, Feyerabend, Kuhn and
Latour have all emphasized the importance of consensus within scientific
communities of practice. Consensus is important for maintaining legitimacy with
outsiders, orchestrating future research, developing educational curricula and
agreeing industry standards. Low consensus contrastingly undermines a field's
reputation and hinders peer review. Aim: This paper aims to investigate the
degree of consensus within the software engineering academic community
concerning members' implicit theories of software engineering. Method: A
convenience sample of 60 software engineering researchers produced diagrams
describing their personal understanding of causal relationships between core
software engineering constructs. The diagrams were then analyzed for patterns
and clusters. Results: At least three schools of thought may be forming;
however, their interpretation is unclear since they do not correspond to known
divisions within the community (e.g. Agile vs. Plan-Driven methods).
Furthermore, over one third of participants do not belong to any cluster.
Conclusion: Although low consensus is common in social sciences, the rapid pace
of innovation observed in software engineering suggests that high consensus is
achievable given renewed commitment to empiricism and evidence-based practice.
