Ebook: Empirical Software Engineering Issues. Critical Assessment and Future Directions: International Workshop, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, June 26-30, 2006. Revised Papers

Victor R. Basili, Dieter Rombach, and Kurt Schneider Introduction In 1992, a Dagstuhl seminar was held on “Experimental Software Engineering Issues” (seminar no. 9238). Its goal was to discuss the state of the art of empirical software engineering (ESE) by assessing past accomplishments, raising open questions, and proposing a future research agenda. Since 1992, the topic of ESE has been adopted more widely by academia as an interesting and promising research topic, and in industrial practice as a necessary infrastructure technology for goal-oriented, sustained process improvement. At the same time, the spectrum of methods applied in ESE has broadened. For example, in 1992, the empirical methods applied in software engineering were basically restricted to quantitative studies (mostly controlled experiments), whereas since then, a range of qualitative methods have been introduced, from observational to ethnographical studies. Thus, the field can be said to have moved from experimental to empirical software engineering. We believe that it is now time to again bring together practitioners and researchers to identify both the progress made since 1992 and the most important challenges for the next five to ten years.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the International Dagstuhl-Seminar on Empirical Software Engineering, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany in June 2006. The purpose of this workshop was to identify the progress of empirical software engineering since 1992, to summarize the state-of-the-art in ESE, to summarize the state-of-the-practice in ESE in industry, and to develop an ESE roadmap for research, practice, education and training.

The 54 revised full papers in this state-of-the-art survey were carefully reviewed and selected from the presentations during the workshop, that provided a forum for a small but representative group of leading experts in software engineering with an emphasis on empirical studies from both universities and industry to meet and reflect on past successes and failures, assess the current state of the practice and research, identify challenges, and define future directions. The papers are organized in topical sections on the empirical paradigm, measurement and model building, technology transfer and education, as well as roadmapping.