Related papers: Do you really code? Designing and Evaluating Scree…
Online participant recruitment platforms such as Prolific have been gaining popularity in research, as they enable researchers to easily access large pools of participants. However, participant quality can be an issue; participants may give…
Online research platforms, such as Prolific, offer rapid access to diverse participant pools but also pose unique challenges in participant qualification and skill verification. Previous studies reported mixed outcomes and challenges in…
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…
Nowadays, software testing professionals are commonly required to develop coding skills to work on test automation. One essential skill required from those who code is the ability to implement code refactoring, a valued quality aspect of…
Background: Research software plays an important role in solving real-life problems, empowering scientific innovations, and handling emergency situations. Therefore, the correctness and trustworthiness of research software are of absolute…
Websites are frequently used by programmers to support the development process. This paper investigates programmer-Web interactions when coding, and combines observations of behaviour with assessments of the resulting source code. We report…
Introductory programming courses often rely on small code-writing exercises that have clearly specified problem statements. This limits opportunities for students to practice how to clarify ambiguous requirements -- a critical skill in…
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…
Quantitative research relies heavily on coding, and coding errors are relatively common even in published research. In this paper, we examine whether individuals are more or less likely to check their code depending on the results they…
Background: Research software is software developed by and/or used by researchers, across a wide variety of domains, to perform their research. Because of the complexity of research software, developers cannot conduct exhaustive testing. As…
Context. Considering the importance of software testing to the development of high quality and reliable software systems, this paper aims to investigate how can work-related factors influence the motivation of software testers. Method. We…
Improved software discovery is a prerequisite for greater software reuse: after all, if someone cannot find software for a particular task, they cannot reuse it. Understanding people's approaches and preferences when they look for software…
In the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots, based on large language models that can generate programming code in any language, write texts and summarize information, it is obvious that the requirements of employers for…
Much of software engineering research focuses on tools, algorithms, and optimization of software. Recently, we, as a community, have come to acknowledge that there is a gap in meta-research and addressing the human-factors in software…
Scientific software-defined as computer programs, scripts, or code used in scientific research, data analysis, modeling, or simulation-has become central to modern research. However, there is limited research on the readability and…
To broaden participation, competitive programming contests may include beginner-level problems that do not require knowledge of advanced Computer Science concepts (e.g., algorithms and data structures). However, since most participants have…
The rapid advancements in Generative AI (GenAI) tools, such as ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot, are transforming software engineering by automating code generation tasks. While these tools improve developer productivity, they also present…
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 prevalence of online platforms and studies has generated the demand for automated grading tools, and as a result, there are plenty in the market. Such tools are developed to grade coding assignments quickly, accurately, and…
Software is infamous for its poor quality and frequent occurrence of bugs. While there is no doubt that thorough testing is an appropriate answer to ensure sufficient quality, the poor state of software generally suggests that developers…