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Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This "research ideas" article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like. Software engineering research…
The potential disconnect between research and practice in software engineering (SE) means that the uptake of research outcomes has at times been limited. In this paper we seek to identify research approaches that are rigorous in terms of…
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…
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…
Empirical methods like experimentation have become a powerful means to drive the field of software engineering by creating scientific evidence on software development, operation, and maintenance, but also by supporting practitioners in…
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…
Background: Publication bias is the failure to publish the results of a study based on the direction or strength of the study findings. The existence of publication bias is firmly established in areas like medical research. Recent research…
Context: The empirical software engineering (ESE) community has contributed to improving experimentation over the years. However, there is still a lack of rigor in describing controlled experiments, hindering reproducibility and…
Over 15 years of teaching, advising students and coordinating scientific research activities and projects in computer science, we have observed the difficulties of students to write scientific papers to present the results of their research…
Background: The development of scientific software applications is far from trivial, due to the constant increase in the necessary complexity of these applications, their increasing size, and their need for intensive maintenance and reuse.…
Reliable effort estimation remains an ongoing challenge to software engineers. Accurate effort estimation is the state of art of software engineering, effort estimation of software is the preliminary phase between the client and the…
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…
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…
Evidence-based practice (EBP) in software engineering aims to improve decision-making in software development by complementing practitioners' professional judgment with high-quality evidence from research. We believe the use of EBP…
Background: Blog posts are frequently used by software practitioners to share information about their practice. Blog posts therefore provide a potential source of evidence for software engineering (SE) research. The use of blog posts as…
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…
Many factors could affect the number of citations to a paper. Citations have an important role in research policy and in measuring the excellence of research and researchers. This work is the first study in software engineering (SE) to…
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…
Context: Empirical studies in software engineering are typically centered on human subjects, ranging from novice to experienced developers. The experience of these individuals is a key context factor that should be properly characterized…
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…