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Software engineering research has experienced rapid growth in both output and participation over the past decades. Yet concerns persist about the field's ability to accumulate, integrate, and reuse knowledge in ways that support long-term…
Background: Blog posts are frequently used by software practitioners to share information about their practice. Blog posts therefore provide a potential source of evidence for software engineering (SE) research. The use of blog posts as…
Accurately predicting faulty software units helps practitioners target faulty units and prioritize their efforts to maintain software quality. Prior studies use machine-learning models to detect faulty software code. We revisit past studies…
For many decades, formal methods are considered to be the way forward to help the software industry to make more reliable and trustworthy software. However, despite this strong belief and many individual success stories, no real change in…
Data is a cornerstone of empirical software engineering (ESE) research and practice. Data underpin numerous process and project management activities, including the estimation of development effort and the prediction of the likely location…
Many dependability techniques expect certain behaviors from the underlying subsystems and fail in chaotic ways if these expectations are not met. Under expected circumstances, however, software tends to work quite well. This paper suggests…
Higher education provides a solid theoretical and practical, but mostly technical, background for the aspiring software developer. Research, however, has shown that graduates still fall short of the expectations of industry. These…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…
Background: Previous research highlights that common misconceptions about developer productivity lead to harmful and inaccurate evaluations of software work, pointing to the need for organizations to differentiate between measures of…
Defect prevention is the most vital but habitually neglected facet of software quality assurance in any project. If functional at all stages of software development, it can condense the time, overheads and wherewithal entailed to engineer a…
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…
To improve software developers' productivity has been the holy grail of software engineering research. But before we can claim to have improved it, we must first be able to measure productivity. This is far from trivial. In fact, two…
Background. There are some publications in software engineering research that aim at guiding researchers in assessing validity threats to their studies. Still, many researchers fail to address many aspects of validity that are essential to…
Although agile software development methods have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide, scientific research still remains quite scarce. The aim of this study is to order and make sense of the different agile…
Context: Mining software repositories is a popular means to gain insights into a software project's evolution, monitor project health, support decisions and derive best practices. Tools supporting the mining process are commonly applied by…
As software continues to permeate nearly every facet of modern life, the complexity and ubiquity of digital services underscore the need for sustainable, effective, and inclusive software development practices. Although software engineering…
One of the main challenges that developers face when testing their systems lies in engineering test cases that are good enough to reveal bugs. And while our body of knowledge on software testing and automated test case generation is already…
Background. Software Engineering (SE) researchers extensively perform experiments with human subjects. Well-defined samples are required to ensure external validity. Samples are selected \textit{purposely} or by \textit{convenience},…
This paper presents a tertiary review of software quality measurement research. To conduct this review, we examined an initial dataset of 7,811 articles and found 75 relevant and high-quality secondary analyses of software quality research.…