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Ethnography has become one of the established methods for empirical research on software engineering. Although there is a wide variety of introductory books available, there has been no material targeting software engineering students…
Context: Software practitioners are a primary provider of information for field studies in software engineering. Research typically recruits practitioners through some kind of sampling. But sampling may not in itself recruit credible…
The software engineering researchers from countries with smaller economies, particularly non-English speaking ones, represent valuable minorities within the software engineering community. As researchers from Poland, we represent such a…
Software repositories is one of the sources of data in Empirical Software Engineering, primarily in the Mining Software Repositories field, aimed at extracting knowledge from the dynamics and practice of software projects. With the…
Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There have been regular discussions in the SE community on this issue since the 1980's, led by pioneers such as Robert Glass. As we recently passed the milestone…
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…
The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) is fundamentally reshaping software engineering (SE), driving a paradigm shift in both academic research and industrial practice. While top-tier SE venues continue to show sustained or…
The use of statistical software in academia and enterprises has been evolving over the last years. More often than not, students, professors, workers, and users, in general, have all had, at some point, exposure to statistical software.…
Software analytics has been the subject of considerable recent attention but is yet to receive significant industry traction. One of the key reasons is that software practitioners are reluctant to trust predictions produced by the analytics…
Statistical analysis is the tool of choice to turn data into information, and then information into empirical knowledge. To be valid, the process that goes from data to knowledge should be supported by detailed, rigorous guidelines, which…
Context: Software engineering (SE) researchers increasingly study Generative AI (GenAI) while also incorporating it into their own research practices. Despite rapid adoption, there is limited empirical evidence on how GenAI is used in SE…
The profile of research software engineering has been greatly enhanced by developments at institutions around the world to form groups and communities that can support effective, sustainable development of research software. We observe,…
This paper explores the intricate challenge of understanding and measuring software engineer behavior. More specifically, we revolve around a central question: How can we enhance our understanding of software engineer behavior? Grounded in…
Statistics comes in two main flavors: frequentist and Bayesian. For historical and technical reasons, frequentist statistics has dominated data analysis in the past; but Bayesian statistics is making a comeback at the forefront of science.…
With the increase of research in self-adaptive systems, there is a need to better understand the way research contributions are evaluated. Such insights will support researchers to better compare new findings when developing new knowledge…
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…
Despite empirical risk minimization (ERM) is widely applied in the machine learning community, its performance is limited on data with spurious correlation or subpopulation that is introduced by hidden attributes. Existing literature…
A key goal of empirical research in software engineering is to assess practical significance, which answers whether the observed effects of some compared treatments show a relevant difference in practice in realistic scenarios. Even though…
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…
According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in…