Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction

by Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst

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 it pro­ vides a concise, comprehensive look at an important aspect of software engineer­ 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.

Genres: Computer Science, Reference

224 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1999

Reviews

[Rares Cristea · Rating 3 out of 5]

So I've mostly skimmed this book, and emphasised on reading the first couple of chapters.

This is a very in depth look at the formal methods needed to apply to create a successful Software Engineering Experiment. I've read it as part of my dissertation thesis, and could concur it helped me a bit. It is very technical, even for what i deem necessary for just a dissertation. However, as it tries to cover a topic not only niche, but one of the few niches that is less formal in one of the most formalised scientific domains. The volatility of best practices in the subject's domain, also doesn't help this book age well. Sure, the agile practices described here are still in practice as they were mostly when the book was written. But it fails to properly address integrating Cloud services and modern CI/CD in the experimentation framework.

Overall, a great book to skim for an introduction on how to formalise something that it is not quite made for formal research.

[Rodrigo Lima · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book for software engineering experimentation