Related papers: Software Engineering User Study Recruitment on Pro…
Software testing is an essential knowledge area required by industry for software engineers. However, software engineering students often consider testing less appealing than designing or coding. Consequently, it is difficult to engage…
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…
Population analysis is crucial for ensuring that empirical software engineering (ESE) research is representative and its findings are valid. Yet, there is a persistent gap between sampling processes and the holistic examination of…
Effective questionnaire design improves the validity of the results, but creating and adapting questionnaires across contexts is challenging due to resource constraints and limited expert access. Recently, the emergence of LLMs has led…
Representative sampling appears rare in empirical software engineering research. Not all studies need representative samples, but a general lack of representative sampling undermines a scientific field. This article therefore reports a…
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.…
This paper documents a year-long experiment to "profile" the process of learning a programming language: gathering data to understand what makes a language hard to learn, and using that data to improve the learning process. We added…
Context: Using student subjects in empirical studies has been discussed extensively from a methodological perspective in Software Engineering (SE), but there is a lack of similar discussion surrounding ethical aspects of doing so. As…
Context: Over the past decade Software Engineering research has seen a steady increase in survey-based studies, and there are several guidelines providing support for those willing to carry out surveys. The need for auditing survey research…
Objective: This research explores using crowdsourcing for software usability evaluation. Background: Usability studies are essential for designing user-friendly software, but traditional methods are often costly and time-consuming.…
[Context] Newcomers joining an unfamiliar software project face numerous barriers; therefore, effective onboarding is essential to help them engage with the team and develop the behaviors, attitudes, and skills needed to excel in their…
Objective: This research study aims to investigate the use of novice crowd inspectors for usability inspection with respect to time spent and the cost incurred. This study compares the results of the novice crowd usability inspection guided…
Co-design is an effective method for designing software, but implementing it within the clinical setting comes with a set of unique challenges. This makes recruitment and engagement of participants difficult, which has been demonstrated in…
Interactive systems are commonly prototyped as web applications. This approach enables studies with functional prototypes on a large scale. However, setting up these studies can be complex due to implementing experiment procedures,…
\textit{Background:} The use of large language models in software testing is growing fast as they support numerous tasks, from test case generation to automation, and documentation. However, their adoption often relies on informal…
Context: Empirical studies in software engineering are typically centered on human subjects, ranging from novice to experienced developers. The experience of these individuals is a key context factor that should be properly characterized…
With the advancement in technology, raw event data generated by the digital world have grown tremendously. However, such data tend to be insufficient and noisy when it comes to measuring user intention or satisfaction. One effective way to…
Diversity and inclusion are necessary prerequisites for shaping technological innovation that benefits society as a whole. A common indicator of diversity consideration is the representation of different social groups among software…
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…
There is a conflict between the need for security compliance by users and the fact that commonly they cannot afford to dedicate much of their time and energy to that security. A balanced level of user engagement in security is difficult to…