Publication:
Evaluating guidelines for reporting empirical software engineering studies

dc.contributor.author Liming, Zhu en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2021-11-25T12:57:05Z
dc.date.available 2021-11-25T12:57:05Z
dc.date.issued 2008 en_US
dc.description.abstract Background. Several researchers have criticized the standards of performing and reporting empirical studies in software engineering. In order to address this problem, Andreas Jedlitschka and Dietmar Pfahl have produced reporting guidelines for controlled experiments in software engineering. They pointed out that their guidelines needed evaluation. We agree that guidelines need to be evaluated before they can be widely adopted. If guidelines are flawed, they will cause more problems that they solve.Aim. The aim of this paper is to present the method we used to evaluate the guidelines and report the results of our evaluation exercise. We suggest our evaluation process may be of more general use if reporting guidelines for other types of empirical study are developed.Method. We used perspective-based inspections to perform a theoretical evaluation of the guidelines. A separate inspection was performed for each perspective. The perspectives used were: Researcher, Practitioner/Consultant, Meta-analyst, Replicator, Reviewer and Author. Apart from the Author perspective, the inspections were based on a set of questions derived by brainstorming. The inspection using the Author perspective reviewed each section of the guidelines sequentially. Results. The question-based perspective inspections detected 42 issues where the guidelines would benefit from amendment or clarification and 8 defects.Conclusions. Reporting guidelines need to specify what information goes into what section and avoid excessive duplication. Software engineering researchers need to be cautious about adopting reporting guidelines that differ from those used by other disciplines. The current guidelines need to be revised and the revised guidelines need to be subjected to further theoretical and empirical validation. Perspective-based inspection is a useful validation method but the practitioner/consultant perspective presents difficulties. en_US
dc.identifier.issn 1382-3256 en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1959.4/38755
dc.language English
dc.language.iso EN en_US
dc.rights CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 en_US
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ en_US
dc.source Legacy MARC en_US
dc.title Evaluating guidelines for reporting empirical software engineering studies en_US
dc.type Journal Article en
dcterms.accessRights metadata only access
dspace.entity.type Publication en_US
unsw.accessRights.uri http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_14cb
unsw.identifier.doiPublisher http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2002.1027796 en_US
unsw.relation.faculty Science
unsw.relation.ispartofissue 1 en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofjournal Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofpagefrompageto 97-121 en_US
unsw.relation.ispartofvolume 13 en_US
unsw.relation.originalPublicationAffiliation Liming, Zhu, Faculty of Science, UNSW en_US
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