Empirical verification of knowledge is one of the foundations for developing any discipline. As far as software construction is concerned, the empirically verified knowledge is not only sparse but also not very widely disseminated among developers and researchers. This book aims to spread the idea of the importance of empirical knowledge in software development from a highly practical viewpoint. It has two goals: (1) Define the body of empirically validated knowledge in software development so as to advise practitioners on what methods or techniques have been empirically analysed and what the results were; (2) as empirical tests have traditionally been carried out by universities or research centres, propose techniques applicable by industry to check on the software development technologies they use.
