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Analyzing software engineering experiments: everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask

Published: 27 May 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Experimentation is a key issue in science and engineering. But it is one of software engineering's stumbling blocks. Quite a lot of experiments are run nowadays, but it is a risky business. Software engineering has some special features, leading to some experimentation issues being conceived of differently than in other disciplines. The aim of this technical briefing is to help participants to avoid common pitfalls when analyzing the results of software engineering experiments. The technical briefing is not intended as a data analysis course, because there is already plenty of literature on this subject. It reviews several key issues that we have identified in published software engineering experiments, and addresses them based on the knowledge acquired after 19 years running experiments.

References

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H. Pashler, E.J. Wagenmakers. Editors' Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A Crisis of Confidence? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(6):528--530, 2012.
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M. Shepperd, D. Bowes, T. Hall. Researcher Bias: The Use of Machine Learning in Software Defect Prediction. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 40(6):603--616, 2014.
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D.I.K. Sjøberg, J.E. Hannay, O. Hansen, V.B. Kampenes, A. Karahasanovic, N.K. Liborg, A.C. Rekdal. A survey of controlled experiments in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 31(9):733--753, 2005

Cited By

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  • (2021)Mining the ROS ecosystem for Green Architectural Tactics in Robotics and an Empirical Evaluation2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00042(300-311)Online publication date: May-2021
  • (2020)Evaluating the impact of caching on the energy consumption and performance of progressive web appsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1145/3387905.3388593(109-119)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020

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  1. Analyzing software engineering experiments: everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICSE '18: Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceeedings
    May 2018
    231 pages
    ISBN:9781450356633
    DOI:10.1145/3183440
    • Conference Chair:
    • Michel Chaudron,
    • General Chair:
    • Ivica Crnkovic,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Marsha Chechik,
    • Mark Harman
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 27 May 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. analysis of experiments
    2. controlled experiments
    3. software engineering experimentation

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    • Short-paper

    Funding Sources

    • Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness

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    ICSE '18
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    Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2021)Mining the ROS ecosystem for Green Architectural Tactics in Robotics and an Empirical Evaluation2021 IEEE/ACM 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR52588.2021.00042(300-311)Online publication date: May-2021
    • (2020)Evaluating the impact of caching on the energy consumption and performance of progressive web appsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1145/3387905.3388593(109-119)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2020

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