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The software engineering research community is productive, yet it faces a constellation of challenges: swamped review processes, metric-driven incentives, distorted publication practices, and increasing pressures from AI, scale, and…
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.…
Large-scale simulations play a central role in science and the industry. Several challenges occur when building simulation software, because simulations require complex software developed in a dynamic construction process. That is why…
Software engineering conferences bring together thousands of academicians and software practitioners so that academic research and professional practices can influence each other. In essence, a symbiotic relationship exists between the…
Confusion over different kinds of secondary research, and their divergent purposes, is undermining the effectiveness and usefulness of secondary studies in software engineering. This short paper therefore explains the differences between ad…
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…
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…
Students enrolled in software engineering degrees are generally required to undertake a research project in their final year through which they demonstrate the ability to conduct research, communicate outcomes, and build in-depth expertise…
Sentiment analysis methods have become popular for investigating human communication, including discussions related to software projects. Since general-purpose sentiment analysis tools do not fit well with the information exchanged by…
As any scientific discipline, the software engineering (SE) research community strives to contribute to the betterment of the target population of our research: software producers and consumers. We will only achieve this betterment if we…
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…
Data is a cornerstone of empirical software engineering (ESE) research and practice. Data underpin numerous process and project management activities, including the estimation of development effort and the prediction of the likely location…
Context: Surveys constitute an valuable tool to capture a large-scale snapshot of the state of the practice. Apparently trivial to adopt, surveys hide, however, several pitfalls that might hinder rendering the result valid and, thus,…
The heterogeneity in the organization of software engineering (SE) research historically exists, i.e., funded research model and hands-on model, which makes software engineering become a thriving interdisciplinary field in the last 50…
Context: It has been argued that software engineering replications are useful for verifying the results of previous experiments. However, it has not yet been agreed how to check whether the results hold across replications. Besides, some…
This chapter seeks to support software engineering (SE) researchers and educators in teaching the importance of theory as well as the theorizing process. Drawing on insights from other fields, the chapter presents 12 intermediate products…
How should researchers analyze randomized experiments in which the main outcome is latent and measured in multiple ways but each measure contains some degree of error? We first identify a critical study-specific noncomparability problem in…
Background: Abstracts are a particularly valuable element in a software engineering research article. However, not all abstracts are as informative as they could be. Objective: Characterize the structure of abstracts in high-quality…
[Context] Although software development is an inherently human activity, research in software engineering (SE) has long focused mostly on processes and tools, failing to recall about the human factors behind. Even when explored, researchers…
Background: Sustainable software engineering (SSE) means creating software in a way that meets present needs without undermining our collective capacity to meet our future needs. It is typically conceptualized as several intersecting…