Related papers: Exploring the Garden of Forking Paths in Empirical…
Context: Software engineering researchers and practitioners rely on empirical evidence from the field. Thus, education of software engineers must include strong and applied education in empirical research methods. For most students, the…
This paper introduces Data-Driven Search-based Software Engineering (DSE), which combines insights from Mining Software Repositories (MSR) and Search-based Software Engineering (SBSE). While MSR formulates software engineering problems as…
The growing complexity of factual claims in real-world scenarios presents significant challenges for automated fact verification systems, particularly in accurately aggregating and reasoning over multi-hop evidence. Existing approaches…
Machine learning systems appear stochastic but are deterministically random, as seeded pseudorandom number generators produce identical realisations across repeated executions. Standard evaluation practice typically treats runs across…
Software containers are widely adopted for developing and deploying software applications. Despite their popularity, major security concerns arise during container development and deployment. Software Engineering (SE) research literature…
The numerical availability of statistical inference methods for a modern and robust analysis of longitudinal- and multivariate data in factorial experiments is an essential element in research and education. While existing approaches that…
Multiverse analysis, a paradigm for statistical analysis that considers all combinations of reasonable analysis choices in parallel, promises to improve transparency and reproducibility. Although recent tools help analysts specify…
As modern software systems continue to grow in complexity, triage has become a fundamental process in system operations and maintenance. Triage aims to efficiently prioritize, assign, and assess issues to ensure the reliability of complex…
Background: The wide adoption of AI- and ML-based systems in sensitive domains raises severe concerns about their fairness. Many methods have been proposed in the literature to enhance software fairness. However, the majority behave as a…
Most scientific publications follow the familiar recipe of (i) obtain data, (ii) fit a model, and (iii) comment on the scientific relevance of the effects of particular covariates in that model. This approach, however, ignores the fact that…
The discovery of novel methodologies for emerging problems is a continuing cycle in ML, often driven by the migration of techniques across domains. Building on this observation, we ask whether current LLM ideation systems benefit from…
Context: Several researchers have reported their experiences in applying secondary studies (Systematic Literature Reviews - SLRs and Systematic Mappings - SMs) in Software Engineering (SE). However, there is still a lack of studies…
In the last 15 years, software architecture has emerged as an important software engineering field for managing the development and maintenance of large, software- intensive systems. Software architecture community has developed numerous…
Estimating the effort of software systems is an essential topic in software engineering, carrying out an estimation process reliably and accurately for a software forms a vital part of the software development phases. Many researchers have…
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…
SourceRank is a scoring system made of 18 metrics that assess the popularity and quality of open-source packages. Despite being used in several recent studies, none has thoroughly analyzed its reliability against evasion attacks aimed at…
In the database community, we typically evaluate new methods based on experimental results, which we produce by integrating the proposed method along with a set of baselines in a single benchmarking codebase and measuring the individual…
In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision-making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any…
All software development processes include steps where several alternatives induce a choice, a decision-making. Sometimes, methodologies offer a way to make decisions. However, in a lot of cases, the arguments to carry out the decision are…
Background: The state of the art in software engineering consists of a myriad of contributions and the gaps between them; it is difficult to characterize. Questions: In order to help understanding the state of the art, can we identify gaps…