Related papers: Evidence Tetris in the Pixelated World of Validity…
Searching for clues, gathering evidence, and reviewing case files are all techniques used by criminal investigators to draw sound conclusions and avoid wrongful convictions. Similarly, in software engineering (SE) research, we can develop…
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…
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.…
Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early…
Recent research increasingly brings to question the appropriateness of using predictive tools in complex, real-world tasks. While a growing body of work has explored ways to improve value alignment in these tools, comparatively less work…
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…
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…
It can be insightful to extend qualitative studies with a secondary quantitative analysis (where the former suggests insightful questions that the latter can answer). Documenting developer beliefs should be the start, not the end, of…
Simulation can enable the study of recommender system (RS) evolution while circumventing many of the issues of empirical longitudinal studies; simulations are comparatively easier to implement, are highly controlled, and pose no ethical…
While certified robustness is widely promoted as a solution to adversarial examples in Artificial Intelligence systems, significant challenges remain before these techniques can be meaningfully deployed in real-world applications. We…
Search engines and information platforms are increasingly scrutinized for their role in spreading misinformation. Traditional responses often focus on detecting falsehoods or verifying the ultimate validity of claims. This paper argues that…
As software becomes more complex and assumes an even greater role in our lives, formal verification is set to become the gold standard in securing software systems into the future, since it can guarantee the absence of errors and entire…
Effective software safety standards will contribute to confidence, or assurance, in the safety of the systems in which the software is used. It is infeasible to demonstrate a correlation between standards and accidents, but there is an…
The generally accepted wisdom in computational circles is that pure proof verification is a solved problem and that the computationally hard elements and fertile areas of study lie in proof discovery. This wisdom presumably does hold for…
It is difficult to neutrally evaluate the risks posed by large-scale leading-edge science experiments. Traditional risk assessment is problematic in this context for multiple reasons. Also, such experiments can be insulated from challenge…
Research in information systems includes a wide range of approaches which make a contribution in terms of knowledge, understanding, or practical developments. The measure of any research is, ultimately, its validity: are its finding true,…
Scientific fact-checking aims to determine the veracity of scientific claims by retrieving and analysing evidence from research literature. The problem is inherently more complex than general fact-checking since it must accommodate the…
Many fields of science rely on software systems to answer different research questions. For valid results researchers need to trust the results scientific software produces, and consequently quality assurance is of utmost importance. In…
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…
As experimental methods become increasingly popular in crowd dynamics, the question of experimental validity becomes more critical than ever. For the purposes of evaluation of crowd experiments, it is paramount that we distinguish between…