Related papers: Evidence Profiles for Validity Threats in Program …
Valid empirical studies build confidence in scientific findings. Fortunately, it is now common for software engineering researchers to consider threats to validity when designing their studies and to discuss them as part of their…
Background. There are some publications in software engineering research that aim at guiding researchers in assessing validity threats to their studies. Still, many researchers fail to address many aspects of validity that are essential to…
Experimentation is an essential method for causal inference in any empirical discipline. Crossover-design experiments are common in Software Engineering (SE) research. In these, subjects apply more than one treatment in different orders.…
Much research on Machine Learning testing relies on empirical studies that evaluate and show their potential. However, in this context empirical results are sensitive to a number of parameters that can adversely impact the results of the…
Background: Construct validity concerns the use of indicators to measure a concept that is not directly measurable. Aim: This study intends to identify, categorize, assess and quantify discussions of threats to construct validity in…
Reading code is an essential activity in software maintenance and evolution. Several studies with human subjects have investigated how different factors, such as the employed programming constructs and naming conventions, can impact code…
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: Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) drives innovation in SE through qualitative and quantitative studies. However, concerns about the correct application of empirical methodologies have existed since the 2006 Dagstuhl seminar on…
Context: Software Engineering (SE) experiments suffer from threats to validity that may impact their results. Replication allows researchers building on top of previous experiments' weaknesses and increasing the reliability of the findings.…
Software repositories are an essential source of information for software engineering research on topics such as project evolution and developer collaboration. Appropriate mining tools and analysis pipelines are therefore an indispensable…
Software fault prediction model are employed to optimize testing resource allocation by identifying fault-prone classes before testing phases. Several researchers' have validated the use of different classification techniques to develop…
Be it in debugging, testing, code review or, more recently, pair programming with AI assistance: in all these activities, software engineers need to understand source code. Accordingly, plenty of research is taking place in the field to…
Prior work on code comprehension uses different comprehension proxies-for example, Likert-scale ratings or answers to input-output questions about program snippets, usually collected from students, to approximate whether code is…
Man-at-the-end (MATE) attackers have full control over the system on which the attacked software runs, and try to break the confidentiality or integrity of assets embedded in the software. Both companies and malware authors want to prevent…
Validity is the truth of an inference made from evidence, such as data collected in an experiment, and is central to working scientifically. Given the maturity of the domain of music information research (MIR), validity in our opinion…
The relevance of code comprehension in a developer's daily work was recognized more than 40 years ago. Consequently, many experiments were conducted to find out how developers could be supported during code comprehension and which code…
Understanding program code is a complicated endeavor. As such, myriad different factors can influence the outcome. Investigations of program comprehension, and in particular those using controlled experiments, have to take these factors…
CONTEXT: There is growing interest in establishing software engineering as an evidence-based discipline. To that end, replication is often used to gain confidence in empirical findings, as opposed to reproduction where the goal is showing…
There is an increasing trend to mine vulnerabilities from software repositories and use machine learning techniques to automatically detect software vulnerabilities. A fundamental but unresolved research question is: how do different…
Context: Mining software repositories is a popular means to gain insights into a software project's evolution, monitor project health, support decisions and derive best practices. Tools supporting the mining process are commonly applied by…