English

Crowdsourcing the State of the Art(ifacts)

Software Engineering 2023-01-26 v1

Abstract

In any field, finding the "leading edge" of research is an on-going challenge. Researchers cannot appease reviewers and educators cannot teach to the leading edge of their field if no one agrees on what is the state-of-the-art. Using a novel crowdsourced "reuse graph" approach, we propose here a new method to learn this state-of-the-art. Our reuse graphs are less effort to build and verify than other community monitoring methods (e.g. artifact tracks or citation-based searches). Based on a study of 170 papers from software engineering (SE) conferences in 2020, we have found over 1,600 instances of reuse; i.e., reuse is rampant in SE research. Prior pessimism about a lack of reuse in SE research may have been a result of using the wrong methods to measure the wrong things.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.06821,
  title  = {Crowdsourcing the State of the Art(ifacts)},
  author = {Maria Teresa Baldassarre and Neil Ernst and Ben Hermann and Tim Menzies and Rahul Yedida},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.06821},
  year   = {2023}
}

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Submitted to Communications ACM