Related papers: Sampling in Software Engineering Research: A Criti…
Context: Software practitioners are a primary provider of information for field studies in software engineering. Research typically recruits practitioners through some kind of sampling. But sampling may not in itself recruit credible…
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…
While mastered by some, good scientific writing practices within Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) research appear to be seldom discussed and documented. Despite this, these practices are implicit or even explicit evaluation criteria of…
Cloud benchmarks suffer from performance fluctuations caused by resource contention, network latency, hardware heterogeneity, and other factors along with decisions taken in the benchmark design. In particular, the sampling strategy of…
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…
Context: Surveys constitute an valuable tool to capture a large-scale snapshot of the state of the practice. Apparently trivial to adopt, surveys hide, however, several pitfalls that might hinder rendering the result valid and, thus,…
Context: Research software is essential for developing advanced tools and models to solve complex research problems and drive innovation across domains. Therefore, it is essential to ensure its correctness. Software testing plays a vital…
While being an important and often used research method, survey research has been less often discussed on a methodological level in empirical software engineering than other types of research. This chapter compiles a set of important and…
Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during…
Empirical software engineering has received much attention in recent years and coined the shift from a more design-science-driven engineering discipline to an insight-oriented, and theory-centric one. Yet, we still face many challenges,…
Peer review is the main mechanism by which the software engineering community assesses the quality of scientific results. However, the rapid growth of paper submissions in software engineering venues has outpaced the availability of…
Background: Abstracts are a particularly valuable element in a software engineering research article. However, not all abstracts are as informative as they could be. Objective: Characterize the structure of abstracts in high-quality…
With the advent of open source software, a veritable treasure trove of previously proprietary software development data was made available. This opened the field of empirical software engineering research to anyone in academia. Data that is…
Recruiting participants for software engineering research has been a primary concern of the human factors community. This is particularly true for quantitative investigations that require a minimum sample size not to be statistically…
Software engineering research is evolving and papers are increasingly based on empirical data from a multitude of sources, using statistical tests to determine if and to what degree empirical evidence supports their hypotheses. To…
Software Engineering practitioners work using highly diverse methods and practices, and general theories in software engineering are lacking. One attempt at creating a common ground in the area of software engineering methodologies has been…
Over the past few years, deep learning methods have been applied for a wide range of Software Engineering (SE) tasks, including in particular for the important task of automatically predicting and localizing faults in software. With the…
[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound evaluations of new approaches. While industry surveys or industrial case studies are preferred to evaluate industrial applicability, controlled experiments with student…
Predictive models are one of the most important techniques that are widely applied in many areas of software engineering. There have been a large number of primary studies that apply predictive models and that present well-preformed studies…
Despite potential benefits in Software Engineering (SE), adoption of software modelling in industry is low. Technical issues such as tool support have gained significant research before, but individual guidance and training have received…