Magnus C. Ohlsson – författare

The purpose of Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction is to introduce students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners to experimentation and experimental evaluation with a focus on software engineering. The objective is, in particular, to provide guidelines for performing experiments evaluating methods, techniques and tools in software engineering. The introduction is provided through a process perspective. The focus is on the steps that we go through to perform experiments and quasi-experiments. The process also includes other types of empirical studies. The motivation for the book emerged from the need for support we experienced when turning our software engineering research more experimental. Several books are available which either treat the subject in very general terms or focus on some specific part of experimentation; most focus on the statistical methods in experimentation. These are important, but there were few books elaborating on experimentation from a process perspective, none addressing experimentation in software engineering in particular.The scope of Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction is primarily experiments in software engineering as a means for evaluating methods, techniques and tools. The book provides some information regarding empirical studies in general, including both case studies and surveys. The intention is to provide a brief understanding of these strategies and in particular to relate them to experimentation. Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction is suitable for use as a textbook or a secondary text for graduate courses, and for researchers and practitioners interested in an empirical approach to software engineering.

It is my belief that software engineers not only need to know software engineering methods and processes, but that they also should know how to assess them. Conse­ quently, I have taught principles of experimentation and empirical studies as part of the software engineering curriculum. Until now, this meant selecting a text from another discipline, usually psychology, and augmenting it with journal or confer­ ence papers that provide students with software engineering examples of experi­ ments and empirical studies. This book fills an important gap in the software engineering literature: it pro­ vides a concise, comprehensive look at an important aspect of software engineer­ ing: experimental analysis of how well software engineering methods, methodologies, and processes work. Since all of these change so rapidly in our field, it is important to know how to evaluate new ones. This book teaches how to go about doing this and thus is valuable not only for the software engineering stu­ dent, but also for the practicing software engineering professional who will be able to • Evaluate software engineering techniques. • Determine the value (or lack thereof) of claims made about a software engineer­ ing method or process in published studies. Finally, this book serves as a valuable resource for the software engineering researcher.

The book is self-contained and it is suitable as a course book in undergraduate or graduate studies where the need for empirical studies in software engineering is stressed.