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Many prescriptive approaches to developing software intensive systems have been advocated but each is based on assumptions about context. It has been found that practitioners do not follow prescribed methodologies, but rather select and…
An increasing number of software companies have already realized the importance of storing project-related data as valuable sources of information for training prediction models. Such kind of modeling opens the door for the implementation…
Evidence-based practice (EBP) in software engineering aims to improve decision-making in software development by complementing practitioners' professional judgment with high-quality evidence from research. We believe the use of EBP…
A growing number of researchers are conducting randomized experiments to analyze causal relationships in network settings where units influence one another. A dominant methodology for analyzing these experiments is design-based, leveraging…
"What-if" questions are intuitively generated and commonly asked during the design process. Engineers and architects need to inherently conduct design decisions, progressing from one phase to another. They either use empirical domain…
It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…
Performance prediction or forecasting sporting outcomes involves a great deal of insight into the particular area one is dealing with, and a considerable amount of intuition about the factors that bear on such outcomes and performances. The…
Automated decision support systems that are able to infer second opinions from experts can potentially facilitate a more efficient allocation of resources; they can help decide when and from whom to seek a second opinion. In this paper, we…
Causal inference is a study of causal relationships between events and the statistical study of inferring these relationships through interventions and other statistical techniques. Causal reasoning is any line of work toward determining…
Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…
Recent years have seen many advances in methods for causal structure learning from data. The empirical assessment of such methods, however, is much less developed. Motivated by this gap, we pose the following question: how can one assess,…
Causal inference is a critical research topic across many domains, such as statistics, computer science, education, public policy and economics, for decades. Nowadays, estimating causal effect from observational data has become an appealing…
Context: Software engineering has a problem in that when we empirically evaluate competing prediction systems we obtain conflicting results. Objective: To reduce the inconsistency amongst validation study results and provide a more formal…
Software Engineering is an applied discipline and concepts are difficult to grasp only at a theoretical level alone. In the context of a project management course, we introduced and evaluated the use of software process simulation (SPS)…
Background: Software project management activities help to introduce software process models in Software Engineering courses. However, these activities should be adequately aligned with the learning outcomes and support student's…
Effort estimation is a complex area in decision-making, and is influenced by a diversity of factors that could increase the estimation error. The effects on effort estimation accuracy of having obsolete requirements in specifications have…
The experimental evaluation of the methods and concepts covered in software engineering has been increasingly valued. This value indicates the constant search for new forms of assessment and validation of the results obtained in Software…
Model composition plays a central role in many software engineering activities such as evolving models to add new features and reconciling conflicting design models developed in parallel by different development teams. As model composition…
Evidence-grounded reasoning requires more than attaching retrieved text to a prediction: a model should make decisions that depend on whether the provided evidence supports the target claim. In practice, this often fails because supervision…
Background: This invited paper is the result of an invitation to write a retrospective article on a "TSE most influential paper" as part of the journal's 50th anniversary. Objective: To reflect on the progress of software engineering…