Related papers: Methodological Issues in Observational Studies
Failure studies are important in revealing the root causes, behaviors, and life cycle of defects in software systems. These studies either focus on understanding the characteristics of defects in specific classes of systems or the…
Software development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich…
Software engineering (SE) is full of abstract concepts that are crucial for both researchers and practitioners, such as programming experience, team productivity, code comprehension, and system security. Secondary studies aimed at…
Machine maintenance is a challenging operational problem, where the goal is to plan sufficient preventive maintenance to avoid machine failures and overhauls. Maintenance is often imperfect in reality and does not make the asset as good as…
Externally controlled trials (ECTs) are increasingly used when randomized controls are infeasible, unethical, or insufficient, including applications in rare diseases, oncology, pediatrics, and post-approval effectiveness research. Although…
This study demonstrates the existence of a testable condition for the identification of the causal effect of a treatment on an outcome in observational data, which relies on two sets of variables: observed covariates to be controlled for…
Background: Despite a long history, numerous laws and regulations, ethics remains an unnatural topic for many software engineering researchers. Poor research ethics may lead to mistrust of research results, lost funding and retraction of…
Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the most effective approach to causal discovery, but in many circumstances it is impossible to conduct RCTs. Therefore observational studies based on passively observed data are widely accepted as an…
As software has become an integral part of scientific workflows, reproducible research practices must take it into account. In what way? Archiving source code is a necessary but insufficient condition. The ability to redeploy software…
Social psychology researchers have, traditionally, focused on the construct of thinking rather than on feeling. Since the beginning of the 21st century, social science researchers have, however, increasingly explored the effects of affect.…
We consider causal models with two observed variables and one latent variables, each variable being discrete, with the goal of characterizing the possible distributions on outcomes that can result from controlling one of the observed…
The quality of requirements specifications may impact subsequent, dependent software engineering (SE) activities. However, empirical evidence of this impact remains scarce and too often superficial as studies abstract from the phenomena…
While probabilistic models describe the dependence structure between observed variables, causal models go one step further: they predict, for example, how cognitive functions are affected by external interventions that perturb neuronal…
Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
For more than thirty years, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity and software quality is to focus on people. The underlying assumption seems to be that "happy and satisfied software developers perform…
Software production research is quickly evolving on two parallel approaches: conventional and bio-inspired. The bio-inspired approaches are generally developed and presented as enhancements of the conventional ones. However the conventional…
Establishing causal relations between random variables from observational data is perhaps the most important challenge in today's \blue{science}. In remote sensing and geosciences this is of special relevance to better understand the…
Should students be used as experimental subjects in software engineering? Given that students are in many cases readily available and cheap it is no surprise that the vast majority of controlled experiments in software engineering use them.…
Context: software projects are common resources in Software Engineering experiments, although these are often selected without following a specific strategy, which reduces the representativeness and replication of the results. An option is…
In the dynamic field of Software Engineering (SE), where practice is constantly evolving and adapting to new technologies, conducting research is a daunting quest. This poses a challenge for researchers: how to stay relevant and effective…