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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.…
Background: Given the social aspects of Software Engineering (SE), in the last twenty years, researchers from the field started using research methods common in social sciences such as case study, ethnography, and grounded theory. More…
Context: software projects are common resources in Software Engineering experiments, although these are often selected without following a specific strategy, which reduces the representativeness and replication of the results. An option is…
Conducting empirical research in software engineering industry is a process, and as such, it should be generalizable. The aim of this paper is to discuss how academic researchers may address some of the challenges they encounter during…
I welcome the contribution from Falessi et al. [1] hereafter referred to as F++ , and the ensuing debate. Experimentation is an important tool within empirical software engineering, so how we select participants is clearly a relevant…
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…
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…
Case studies are a popular and noteworthy type of research study in software engineering, offering significant potential to impact industry practices by investigating phenomena in their natural contexts. This potential to reach a broad…
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.…
Empirical Software Engineering has received much attention in recent years and became a de-facto standard for scientific practice in Software Engineering. However, while extensive guidelines are nowadays available for designing, conducting,…
Research software -- specialist software used to support or undertake research -- is of huge importance to researchers. It contributes to significant advances in the wider world and requires collaboration between people with diverse skills…
Background: The need for empirical investigations in software engineering is growing. Many researchers nowadays, conduct and validate their solutions using empirical research. Survey is one empirical method which enables researchers to…
Recruiting participants for software engineering research has been a primary concern of the human factors community. This is particularly true for quantitative investigations that require a minimum sample size not to be statistically…
Anecdotal evidence suggests that Research Software Engineers (RSEs) and Software Engineering Researchers (SERs) often use different terminologies for similar concepts, creating communication challenges. To better understand these…
The discipline of software engineering (SE) combines social and technological dimensions. It is an interdisciplinary research field. However, interdisciplinary research submitted to software engineering venues may not receive the same level…
Assessing the personality of software engineers may help to match individual traits with the characteristics of development activities such as code review and testing, as well as support managers in team composition. However,…
Background: Reaching out to professional software developers is a crucial part of empirical software engineering research. One important method to investigate the state of practice is survey research. As drawing a random sample of…
Software producers are now recognizing the importance of improving their products' suitability for diverse populations, but little attention has been given to measurements to shed light on products' suitability to individuals below the…
Context: Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) faces increasing challenges due to data scale, methodological complexity, and reproducibility concerns. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as promising tools to support empirical…
Failure to account for human values in software (e.g., equality and fairness) can result in user dissatisfaction and negative socio-economic impact. Engineering these values in software, however, requires technical and methodological…