The Maturation of Empirical Studies

Abstract

Conducting empirical studies and transferring their results into industry in a design discipline such as software engineering is ambitious. This is due to contextual restrictions, representativeness as well as problems in aggregating results from individual studies towards guidelines for practitioners. Nevertheless, they are necessary, as scientific contributions need to be challengeable. Significant progress in areas such as measurement, controlled experiments, industrial case studies, empirical based modeling, and packaging knowledge have been made over the past 30 to 40 years. External visibility has been increased significantly by means of books, conferences & journals! Future challenges include attracting more industrial contributions to the existing body of knowledge, using quantitative & qualitative studies to create more trustful evidences, and aggregation of empirical results. These challenges require community efforts.