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An Analysis of the Empirical Software Engineering over the last 10 Editions of Brazilian Software Engineering Symposium

Published: 20 September 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Empirical evaluations developed in the software engineering area have been widely applied as a formalism to validate and ensure the credibility of the works proposed by the researchers. Even though the adoption of empirical evaluation techniques has gained popularity in recent years, its application has been questioned both qualitatively and quantitatively. This study aims at analyzing how empirical software engineering research has evolved in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) community. We performed a controlled quasi-experiment, using published papers over the last 10 years in SBES. Our experiment was divided into two phases: classification by type and quality assessment of the main empirical types. In the first phase, the sample was 201 papers; in the second one, the sample decreased to 126 papers. The results have shown failures and gaps in the application of empirical methods when assessing the quality of the Software Engineering works. We believe that we can contribute to improve how the studies were conducted and consequently help to produce more reliable results, reducing or eliminating biases: an important qualitative factor in scientific work. In addition, due to the lack of assessment supporting tools, we developed a theoretical protocol to support the assessment process and proposed improvements for papers that obtained below-expected rates.

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  1. An Analysis of the Empirical Software Engineering over the last 10 Editions of Brazilian Software Engineering Symposium

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      SBES '17: Proceedings of the XXXI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
      September 2017
      409 pages
      ISBN:9781450353267
      DOI:10.1145/3131151
      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]

      In-Cooperation

      • SBC: Brazilian Computer Society
      • CNPq: Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecn
      • CAPES: Brazilian Higher Education Funding Council

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 20 September 2017

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      Author Tags

      1. Empirical Evaluation
      2. Empirical Software Engineering
      3. Quality assessment
      4. Research Protocol

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      • Research
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      SBES'17
      SBES'17: 31st Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
      September 20 - 22, 2017
      CE, Fortaleza, Brazil

      Acceptance Rates

      SBES '17 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 134 submissions, 31%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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