Related papers: "Estimating software project effort using analogie…
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…
Context: Early size predictions (ESP) can lead to errors in effort predictions for software projects. This problem is particular acute in parametric effort models that give extra weight to size factors (for example, the COCOMO model assumes…
The community of program optimisation and analysis, code performance evaluation, parallelisation and optimising compilation has published since many decades hundreds of research and engineering articles in major conferences and journals.…
Empirical software engineering has received much attention in recent years and coined the shift from a more design-science-driven engineering discipline to an insight-oriented, and theory-centric one. Yet, we still face many challenges,…
Glass published the first report on the assessment of systems and software engineering scholars and institutions two decades ago. The ongoing, annual survey of publications in this field provides fund managers, young scholars, graduate…
Effort estimation is a complex area in decision-making, and is influenced by a diversity of factors that could increase the estimation error. The effects on effort estimation accuracy of having obsolete requirements in specifications have…
Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process…
Experimentation with software prototypes plays a fundamental role in software engineering research. In contrast to many other scientific disciplines, however, explicit support for this key activity in software engineering is relatively…
Experimentation is an essential method for causal inference in any empirical discipline. Crossover-design experiments are common in Software Engineering (SE) research. In these, subjects apply more than one treatment in different orders.…
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…
While Sustainable Software Engineering (SSE) tools are widely studied in academia, their practical feasibility in industrial workflows, particularly in regulated environments, remains poorly understood. This study investigates how software…
AI-based systems, currently driven largely by LLMs and tool-using agentic harnesses, are increasingly discussed as a possible threat to software engineering. Foundation models get stronger, agents can plan and act across multiple steps, and…
This paper proposes a new challenge problem for software analytics. In the process we shall call "software review", a panel of SMEs (subject matter experts) review examples of software behavior to recommend how to improve that's software's…
Agile teams juggle multiple tasks so professionals are often assigned to multiple projects, especially in service organizations that monitor and maintain a large suite of software for a large user base. If we could predict changes in…
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…
[Background] A well-formulated research problem is essential for achieving practical relevance in Software Engineering (SE), yet there is a lack of structured guidance in this early phase. [Aims] Our goal is to introduce and evaluate seven…
There is growing acknowledgement within the software engineering community that a theory of software development is needed to integrate the myriad methodologies that are currently popular, some of which are based on opposing perspectives.…
[Background:] Software effort prediction methods and models typically assume positive correlation between software product complexity and development effort. However, conflicting observations, i.e. negative correlation between product…
Systematic literature reviews tentativelydescribe the state of the art in a given research area. However, the continuous publication of new primary and secondary studies following the release of a tertiary study can make the communication…
Empathy is a powerful yet often overlooked element in software engineering (SE), supporting better teamwork, smoother communication, and effective decision-making.This paper introduces 17 actionable empathy guidelines designed to support…