Empirical Software Engineering

ISERN Agenda

Monday, 14th November

8.30 Registration and Coffee

9.00 Opening 
Chairs: Ross Jeffrey, Dag Sjøberg, Murray Wood
Welcome, objectives, agenda

9.15 New Participant Introductions
Chair: Dieter Rombach
Brief introduction of Candidates and Observers

Candidates 5 mins presentation each.
Currently: 
NRC - Erdogmus; Mississippi - Carver; Valencia - Pastor; Northrop Grumman - Selby; 
Japan Manned Space - Ms. Nakao Haruka; Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Sassaneh Poosti; Sheffield - Cowling.

Observers quick-round 2 mins introduction (without presentation) each.
Currently: 
Eindhoven University of Technology - Chaudron; Microsoft - Nagappan; Osaka Univiversity - Shinji Kusumoto.

10.00 Guidelines for Empirical Research
Chair: Dieter Rombach, Dieter.Rombach@iese.fraunhofer.de
Contributors: 
Dieter Rombach: Lessons learned at IESE 
Carolyn Seaman: Guidelines for qualitative research & publication 
Organisation: 
Interactive discussion (maybe a number of additional position statements: max 2 minutes)
11.15 Break

11.45 Data Ownership
Chair: Vic Basili, basili@cs.umd.edu
Organisation:
The discussion will be based on the white paper distributed before the
meeting.


13.00 Lunch

14.00 Comparable Evidence: subjects, objects and context?
Chair: Claes Wohlin, Claes.Wohlin@bth.se
Contributors: 
Claes Wohlin: Comparable Evidence across Experiments (session introduction)
José Maldonado: Readers Project: Quality Aspects in Empirical Studies
Barbara Kitchenham: Witch Doctors and Sugar Pills 
Organisation:
The discussions will be focused on problems/challenges with running experiments and ensuring that they generate trustworthy and comparable evidence.

15.30 Break

15.45 Generalisation from Empirical Studies
Chair: Tore Dybå, Tore.Dyba@sintef.no
Contributors: 
Tore Dybå: Generalization from empirical studies (session intro)
Erik Arisholm: Generalizing results through a series of replicated experiments on software maintainability
Jeff Carver: Methods and Tools for Supporting Generalization
Organisation:
The goal of the session is to get a discussion going regarding how valid generalizations can be made and point to some of the methods that empirical SE scientists use in doing so. 

17.15 Day Adjourned


Tuesday, 15th November

8.30 Coffee

9.00 Value-based Empirical Methods
Chair: Barry Boehm, boehm@cse.usc.edu
Contributors: 
Stefan Biffl, Aybuke Aurum, Rick Selby, Dan Port, Barry Boehm
Organisation:
The focus of the session will be on ways to incorporate business values or mission values into the hypotheses driving empirical research or practitioner efforts, and into the resulting empirical data collection and analysis. 

10.30 Break

11.00: Agile Development
Chair: Pekka Abrahamsson, Pekka.Abrahamsson@vtt.fi
Contributors: 
Hakan Erdogmus: Agile economics: Value of agile software development
Laurie Williams: Conducting industrially relevant case studies
Erik Arisholm: Evaluating Pair Programming among Professional Java Developers

12.30 Lunch

13.30 Balancing Practices: Inspections, Testing, and Others
Chairs: Marcus Ciolkowski, ciolkows@informatik.uni-kl.de and Forrest Shull, fshull@fc-md.umd.edu
Organisation:
Participants will discuss whether we as a field know enough to set up a balanced QA strategy based on specific quality goals (like “maintainability,” “reusability,” “security,” etc.). Some short industrial scenarios and experts on selected QA practices will help to
focus the discussion.
Desired outcomes:
- A better understanding of how manual techniques like inspection relate to other QA practices (automated checkers, testing) for achieving those goals, in terms of costs and benefits.
- Concrete ideas that can be applied in future research to undertake balancing of QA practices more rigorously.
- An identified set of ISERN participants doing research work into QA practices who could benefit by sharing and comparing results.

14.45 Break

15.00 Measuring Alignment of Stakeholder Goals and Requirements
Chair: Karl Cox, Karl.Cox@nicta.com.au
Organisation:
Open discussion with goal of setting agenda for future collaboration on measuring alignment between stakeholder goals and requirements.

15.45 Planning for ISERN06 / Open Issues

16.45 ISERN05 Adjourned