Related papers: Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Resea…
A key goal of empirical research in software engineering is to assess practical significance, which answers whether the observed effects of some compared treatments show a relevant difference in practice in realistic scenarios. Even though…
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…
Background: Given the social aspects of Software Engineering (SE), in the last twenty years, researchers from the field started using research methods common in social sciences such as case study, ethnography, and grounded theory. More…
Software security has been an important research topic over the years. The community has proposed processes and tools for secure software development and security analysis. However, a significant number of vulnerabilities remains in…
The potential disconnect between research and practice in software engineering (SE) means that the uptake of research outcomes has at times been limited. In this paper we seek to identify research approaches that are rigorous in terms of…
Many industrial software development processes today have to comply with security standards such as the IEC~62443-4-1. These standards, written in natural language, are ambiguous and complex to understand. This is especially true for…
Actually, software products are increasing in a fast way and are used in almost all activities of human life. Consequently measuring and evaluating the quality of a software product has become a critical task for many companies. Several…
Background: The state of the art in software engineering consists of a myriad of contributions and the gaps between them; it is difficult to characterize. Questions: In order to help understanding the state of the art, can we identify gaps…
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…
Background: Reaching out to professional software developers is a crucial part of empirical software engineering research. One important method to investigate the state of practice is survey research. As drawing a random sample of…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software engineering by profoundly influencing coding, documentation, and system maintenance practices. As these tools become deeply embedded in developers' daily workflows,…
Context: The utility of prediction models in empirical software engineering (ESE) is heavily reliant on the quality of the data used in building those models. Several data quality challenges such as noise, incompleteness, outliers and…
Background: Philosophers of science including Collins, Feyerabend, Kuhn and Latour have all emphasized the importance of consensus within scientific communities of practice. Consensus is important for maintaining legitimacy with outsiders,…
Real-world software applications must constantly evolve to remain relevant. This evolution occurs when developing new applications or adapting existing ones to meet new requirements, make corrections, or incorporate future functionality.…
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.…
Empirical software engineering research on production systems has brought forth a better understanding of the software engineering process for practitioners and researchers alike. However, only a small subset of production systems is…
Existing work on the practical impact of software engineering (SE) research examines industrial relevance rather than adoption of study results, hence the question of how results have been practically applied remains open. To answer this…
The use of large language models (LLMs) for qualitative analysis is gaining attention in various fields, including software engineering, where qualitative methods are essential for understanding human and social factors. This study aimed to…
Requirements expressed in natural language are an indispensable artifact in the software development process, as all stakeholders can understand them. However, their ambiguity poses a persistent challenge. To address this issue,…
Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few…