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Context: Advancements in machine learning (ML) lead to a shift from the traditional view of software development, where algorithms are hard-coded by humans, to ML systems materialized through learning from data. Therefore, we need to…
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…
Research must be reproducible in order to make an impact on science and to contribute to the body of knowledge in our field. Yet studies have shown that 70% of research from academic labs cannot be reproduced. In software engineering, and…
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…
Empirical software engineering is concerned with the design and analysis of empirical studies that include software products, processes, and resources. Optimization is a form of data analytics in support of human decision-making.…
Peer review is a key activity intended to preserve the quality and integrity of scientific publications. However, in practice it is far from perfect. We aim at understanding how reviewers, including those who have won awards for reviewing,…
Podcasts have become an increasingly popular medium for knowledge sharing within the software engineering (SE) community, offering insights into industry developments and the perspectives of professionals with different backgrounds. As this…
Background: Classifications in meta-research enable researchers to cope with an increasing body of scientific knowledge. They provide a framework for, e.g., distinguishing methods, reports, reproducibility, and evaluation in a knowledge…
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…
Recent years have seen the successful application of deep learning to software engineering (SE). In particular, the development and use of pre-trained models of source code has enabled state-of-the-art results to be achieved on a wide…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) or Machine Learning (ML) systems have been widely adopted as value propositions by companies in all industries in order to create or extend the services and products they offer. However, developing AI/ML systems…
Web search plays an integral role in software engineering (SE) to help with various tasks such as finding documentation, debugging, installation, etc. In this work, we present the first large-scale analysis of web search behavior for SE…
Background: Research software is crucial for enabling research discoveries and supporting data analysis, simulation, and interpretation across domains. However, evolving requirements, complex inputs, and legacy dependencies hinder the…
Language Models (LLMs), such as transformer-based neural networks trained on billions of parameters, have become increasingly prevalent in software engineering (SE). These models, trained on extensive datasets that include code…
From its early foundations in the 1970s, empirical software engineering (ESE) has evolved into a mature research discipline that embraces a plethora of different topics, methodologies, and industrial practices. Despite its remarkable…
The traditional path to a software engineering career usually involves a post-secondary diploma in Software Engineering, Computer Science, or a related field. However, many individuals working as software engineers take a non-traditional…
Understanding how software developers think, make decisions, and behave remains a key challenge in software engineering (SE). Verbalization techniques (methods that capture spoken or written thought processes) offer a lightweight and…
Software product lines have recently been presented as one of the best promising improvements for the efficient software development. Different research works contribute supportive parameters and negotiations regarding the problems of…
As modern software systems continue to grow in complexity, triage has become a fundamental process in system operations and maintenance. Triage aims to efficiently prioritize, assign, and assess issues to ensure the reliability of complex…
Conference peer review constitutes a human-computation process whose importance cannot be overstated: not only it identifies the best submissions for acceptance, but, ultimately, it impacts the future of the whole research area by promoting…