WEB SITE FOR FALL 2025 UNDER CONSTRUCTION UNTIL THIS LINE IS REMOVED!

Until then everything in this home page is tentative.

To Go Directly to the Topics List

For Other Information including about Mental Health Support, Continuity Plans, Academic Integrity, Grievance, Discipline, Academic Offenses, Appeals, a Note for Students with Disabilities, Turnitin.com, and If You Do Not Write Your Final Exam

"E", "em", and "er" are gender non-specific third-person singular pronouns in subjective, objective, and possessive forms, respectively.

Courses and Sections:

CS846 is Advanced Topics in Software Engineering, a graduate seminar. Section X is Empirical Studies of People Doing Software Engineering or Advanced Topics in People Empirical Software Engineering.

Instructor:

The reason I have no telephone is that I am nearly deaf. I do not sign, but I do read lips. So, I cannot use a voice-only telephone. I can use a video communication medium if the bandwidth of the connection is high enough that the image gets updated at the frequency of television or movies and thus, the lip movement is smooth enough to be decipherable.

I prefer to meet in person. There's never a bandwidth problem that prevents lipreading. For the safety of both of us, I am vaccinated to the hilt.
If necessary, we can meet via Zoom. Please send to me e-mail that you want to meet with some possible times, and I will reply with one of those times or an alternative proposal. When we agree on a time, I will send you a Zoom invitation.

Evaluation of Instructor at the End of the Term

Highest Level Course Outline:

Course Times and Locations:

AAAAs and BBBBs: CCCC--DDDD in DC EEEE

Readings:

No textbook. Notes are provided at this Web site or are provided at vault.cs.uwaterloo.ca at a URL sent by e-mail to all that are registered in the course.

Workload:

1. Do one of
   • do some project, e.g., a pilot experiment with volunteering subjects (It is not clear how this would work while we are online!),
   • thoroughly explore the research on some topic involving the way people do SE,
   • conduct some pilot empirical study, e.g., with an anonymous survey or with interviews, of the way people do SE, e.g., at a company for which you have worked or in a more general setting, or
   • explore empirical studies of the way people do work in your own area particularly if this work leads to software's being developed,
2. Write a conference-sized paper, about 10 pages long, about the project or research.
3. Give a 30-minute talk based on the paper so that the whole class benefits from it, and the prof has one less lecture to do ☺.

Please get your project or report topic approved by the prof before going too far into it, to make sure that it will be acceptable. Please see the short description of the course for more details.

The due date for the project or report is FFFF GG HHHHH

Archive of E-mail Sent to Class:

Click Here for an archive of the e-mail sent to the entire class

Possible Topics for Students:

Here is a list of possible topics for students. This list will be growing as I think of things. In addition to these, you may choose any topic from the topics list about which the prof is not talking or about which he does not talk about everything. Of course, if you have a relevant topic that excites you, propose it in e-mail to the prof.

Student Lecture Schedule

Topics List

The URLs, particularly of published journal articles, conference articles, and books, should be exercised from within the University of Waterloo Library, where you can sign on with your watIam credentials. Then, you should not have to pay for a download.

Also, being on campus or in a VPN that makes you appear to be on campus works, as well.

           

Journals and Conferences	Journals and Conferences focusing on empirical software engineering as at least one of its subject of interest.	Note that you will find many papers describing empirical studies also in other software engineering journals and conferences, e.g., IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, ICSE (International Confereence of Software Engineering), and more specialized venues.
	Empirical Software Engineering	Empirical Software Engineering grouped by Topics
	Science of Computer Programming	International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, renamed at one point to Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Software Engineering Experimentation	Read one of the following:
	Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6:	Experimentation in Software Engineering, Wohlin, Claes, et al, 2012
	Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4:	Basics of Software Engineering Experimentation, Juristo, Natalia and Moreno, Ana M., 2001
	Supplemental Reading: Read Chapter 11 ("Selecting Empirical Methods for Software Engineering Research") as an overview and whatever of the other chapters that interest you. In particular, there are chapters about many kinds of empirical studies, not just experimentation.	Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering Shull, Forrest, et al, 2008
	Supplemental Reading: A discussion of issues in Empirical Software Engineering	Empirical Software Engineering Issues. Critical Assessment and Future Directions; Victor R. Basili, Kurt Schneider, Dietmar Pfahl, Dieter Rombach, Barbara Kitchenham, Richard W. Selby (Eds.); LNCS 4336, Springer
	Supplemental Reading: Semi-satirical paper about conducting randomized controlled trials with half of subjects receiving placebos	"Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials"
	Main Slides: Tradeoffs in Experiments of Software Methods
Empirical Software Engineering?	The first paper by Walter Tichy admonishing the Software Engineering Field for its failure to experimentally validate its work, a follow on about evaluating papers about empirical work, and a status report:
	"Should computer scientists experiment more?"; Walter F Tichy; IEEE Computer; Volume 31, Issue 5, Pages 32-40, 1998	"Hints for reviewing empirical work in software engineering"; Walter F Tichy; Empirical Software Engineering; Volume 5, Issue 4, Pages 309-212, 2000
	"Status of empirical research in software engineering"; Andreas Höfer, Walter F Tichy; Pages 10-19, 2007

This page is at https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~dberry/ATES/index.shtml