No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Welcome to the second issue of Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal. In this issue we offer a selection of papers ranging from controlled experiments to case studies to infrastructure issues. Each of these papers adds to our understanding of the discipline and provides some insights, by example, to approaches for empirical study. Areas of study include object-oriented techniques, reading technologies, testing technologies, and requirements engineering.
For instance, the authors of "Evaluating the Effect of Inheritance on the Maintainability of Object-Oriented Software" (by John Daly, Andrew Brooks, James Miller, Marc Roper and Murray Wood) have discovered, ". . . little empirical evidence to support many of the claims made of [object-oriented technology]". In this paper, the performance of subjects involved in maintaining object-oriented software at differing levels of inheritance is compared to the same maintenance activities on object-based software with no inheritance.
In another controlled experiment, the authors of "The Empirical Investigation of Perspective Based Reading" (by Victor R. Basili, Scott Green, Oliver Laitenberger, Forrest Shull, Sivert Sorumgard and Marvin V. Zelkowitz) argue that since ". . . reading is a key, if not the key technical activity for verifying and validating software work products . . . ", they experimentally compare different techniques for reading requirements documents. Donald W. Sova and Carol Smidts, authors of "Increasing Testing Productivity and Software Quality: A Comparison of Software Testing Methodologies Within NASA" point out: "Selecting comparable case studies is a challenge faced by all software researchers . . . ". In this paper, they not only arrive at some results experimentally, but they also address the problem of developing an approach for comparing case studies involving different approaches to quality assurance.
From time to time, we plan to have various opinion pieces by the editors and others, hopefully with one such item per issue. In this issue, we offer an editorial on the need for and current state of empirical software studies.
We hope that this journal will become a forum for well-thought-out opinion pieces dealing with the community. We actively encourage members of the community to contribute to our Viewpoint section. If our readers have ideas for issues to be discussed, we invite you to share them with either Warren (
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