2011 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement

The Software Engineering Research community has slowly recognized that empirical studies are an important way of validating ideas and increasingly our community has stopped accepting the sufficiency of arguing that a smart person has come up with the idea and therefore it must be good. This has led to a flood of empirical software engineering papers. However, not all empirical studies are created ... View full abstract»

The Software Engineering Research community has slowly recognized that empirical studies are an important way of validating ideas and increasingly our community has stopped accepting the sufficiency of arguing that a smart person has come up with the idea and therefore it must be good. This has led to a flood of Software Engineering papers that contain at least some form of empirical study. Howeve... View full abstract»

The idea behind Design by Contract (DbC) is that a method defines a contract stating the requirements a client needs to fulfill to use it, the precondition, and the properties it ensures after its execution, the post condition. Though there exists ample support for DbC for sequential programs, applying DbC to concurrent programs presents several challenges. We have proposed a solution to these cha... View full abstract»

Much recent research effort has been devoted to designing efficient code clone detection techniques and tools. However, there has been little human-based empirical study of developers as they use the outputs of those tools while performing maintenance tasks. This paper describes a study that investigates the usefulness of code clone information for performing a bug localization task. In this study... View full abstract»

Open Source software is competing successfully in many areas. The commercial sector is recognizing the benefits offered by Open Source development methods that lead to high quality software. Can these benefits be realized in specialized domains where expertise is rare? This study examined discussion forums of an Open Source project in a particular specialized application domain - electronic medica... View full abstract»

An empirical study was conducted in order to evaluate the simplicity of FPA, COSMIC and Paths, from the IT practitioners' viewpoint. The results have shown that P are the simplest measure because they presented a significantly lower measurement time. The study has also been useful to see which aspects of Paths should be clarified in order to facilitate the practitioners' application of this measur... View full abstract»

This study looks at software measurement practices and experiences related to software engineering in Finland. This paper uses the results of an empirical case study to examine how measurement was implemented in practice from the perspective of the software process. The research was motivated by the challenges recognized in the implementation and execution of measurement in software development wo... View full abstract»

The goal of this article is to identify criteria used in industrial practice to select members of a software project team, and to look for relationships between these criteria and project success. Initially, using semi-structured interviews for data collection and qualitative methods for data analysis and synthesis, a set of team building criteria was identified from project managers in industry. ... View full abstract»

All meta-analyses should include a heterogeneity analysis. Even so, it is not easy to decide whether a set of studies are homogeneous or heterogeneous because of the low statistical power of the statistics used (usually the Q test). Objective: Determine a set of rules enabling SE researchers to find out, based on the characteristics of the experiments to be aggregated, whether or not it is feasibl... View full abstract»

Background: A systematic literature review (SLR) is a methodology used to aggregate all relevant existing evidence to answer a research question of interest. Although crucial, the process used to select primary studies can be arduous, time consuming, and must often be conducted manually. Objective: We propose a novel approach, known as 'Systematic Literature Review based on Visual Text Mining' or ... View full abstract»

BACKGROUND: Systematic Literature Reviews (SLRs) have gained significant popularity among software engineering (SE) researchers since 2004. Several researchers have also been working on improving the scientific and technological support for SLRs in SE. We argue that there is also an essential need for evidence-based body of knowledge about different aspects of the adoption of SLRs in SE. OBJECTIVE... View full abstract»

Security vulnerabilities discovered later in the development cycle are more expensive to fix than those discovered early. Therefore, software developers should strive to discover vulnerabilities as early as possible. Unfortunately, the large size of code bases and lack of developer expertise can make discovering software vulnerabilities difficult. To ease this difficulty, many different types of t... View full abstract»

Even though empirical research has grown in interest, techniques, methodologies and best practices are still in debate. In this context, test beds are effective when one needs to evaluate and compare technologies. The concept is well disseminated in other areas such as Computer Networks, but remains poorly explored in Software Engineering (SE). This paper presents a systematic mapping study on the... View full abstract»

Automatic testing, in particular test input generation, has become increasingly popular in the research community over the past ten years. In this paper, we conduct a survey on existing concolic testing tools, discussing their strengths and limitations, and environments in which they can be applied. We also conduct a case study to determine the prevalence of the identified limitations in six large... View full abstract»

Software measures are often used to assess program comprehension, although their applicability is discussed controversially. Often, their application is based on plausibility arguments, which, however, is not sufficient to decide whether software measures are good predictors for program comprehension. Our goal is to evaluate whether and how software measures and program comprehension correlate. To... View full abstract»

Comments are very useful to developers during maintenance tasks and are useful as well to help structuring a code at development time. They convey useful information about the system functionalities as well as the state of mind of a developer. Comments in code have been the focus of several studies, but none of them was targeted at analyzing commenting habits precisely. In this paper, we present a... View full abstract»

End-user programmers outnumber professionals programmers, write software that matters to an increasingly large number of users, and face software engineering challenges that are similar to their professionals counterparts. Yet, we know little about how these end-user programmers create and share artifacts as part of a community. To gain a better understanding of these issues, we perform an artifac... View full abstract»

The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is an object-oriented analysis and design language widely used to created artifacts during the software system lifecycle. UML being a standard notation, without specific guidelines as to how to use it, it must be applied in the context of a specific software development process. The Unified Process (UP) is one such process, extensively used by the object-oriente... View full abstract»