1st International Doctoral Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (IDoESE 2006)

September 20, 2006, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

http://www.sbl.tkk.fi/idoese/

Version 1.06

Updates

Introduction

Empirical work in software engineering has increased substantially since the 1990s and is now considered a fundamental requirement of high quality research in software engineering. This has also lead to improvements in the quality and rigor in empirical research in the software engineering. The ISERN community, ISESE conference and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal have been instrumental in advancing the standards in empirical research.

There are several doctoral students around the world pursuing their doctoral research in software engineering with specific interest in using sound empirical methods. The 1st International Doctoral Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (IDoESE 2006) is intended to provide an opportunity for these Ph.D. students to present their work and plans to the more senior members of the community. The objective is to improve the empirical designs and rigor in doctoral dissertations, share experiences and practices, and support the networking and cooperation within the community, in particular, between the promising young researchers and senior member of the community.

The Symposium will have one presentation on the requirements for an empirical doctoral dissertation, but most of the time will be spent on reviewing doctoral students' research plans and empirical study designs and arrangements. Each accepted research plan will be reviewed by at least two senior members of the community and by two other students participating in the Symposium. We believe that both receiving and giving feedback will be a useful learning experience for the participants. Hence, participation requires the following:

• submitting and presenting a research plan,

• reviewing and commenting two research plans, and

• acting as a scribe in one review session.

Organization

The event will be co-chaired by Professor Jyrki Kontio and Professor Victor R. Basili and other senior members of the community will participate in the review process:  Professor Barry Boehm, University of Southern California; Professor Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; and Professor Claes Wohlin, Blekinge Institute of Technology.

Professor Jyrki Kontio, Helsinki University of Technology

Professor Victor R. Basili, University of Maryland

Professor Barry Boehm, University of Southern California

Professor Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Professor Claes Wohlin, Blekinge Institute of Technology

Agenda

Please note that plan titles that have a hyperlink can be downloaded or requested from the author. These authors have made their plans available in order to obtain more feedback from other participants of the event.

to be reviewed off-line:

Instructions for Presentations

The student sessions have been designed so that most of the time will be spent on discussion and interaction. Discussants should assume that all participants in the discussion have read the plan. The reviewing professor will act as a the chair in each session. The format of the presentations for each of the Ph.D. students is as follows:

• Overview of the research: i) motivation and context, ii) statement of the research problem, and iii) research approach (maximum of three slides and five minutes)

• Reviewer feedback (20 minutes)

• Conclusions, including brief commentary on the student review reports or additional questions by the student reviewers (5 mins)

Instructions for Reviews

The students co-reviewing the research plan should email their review report to plan author, reviewing professor and Jyrki Kontio by Sept 17. The reviews should address at least the following points:

• Key terms – Review the correctness and consistency of terms and definition and their meaning presented in the plan. Internal consistency of the terms and typos should also be reviewed.

• Coverage of the background literature – Review the gaps identified from the literature review and which gaps are particularly tackled in the research study. Review whether motivation for the proposed study is based on the literature review. Review the main contributions identified in the literature relevant to the proposed study.

• Scope – Review the scope of the study in terms of its applicability to the identified gap in the literature.

• Research questions – Review the proposed research questions and how they were derived.

• Research design – Review the proposed research design (including methods) and its relevance to the research question being studied.

  • How well do the are the objectives and research questions addressed by the empirical work in the plan?

  • Do the empirical study plans and arrangements correspond to the best practices in empirical research?

  • How are validity threats addressed?

• Novelty of contribution – Review the novelty of contributions of the study. How is the generalizeability of the results handled?

The recommended length of the review report is 1000 words or less (ca. two single space pages).

Call for Participation

The IDoESE is open for all registered participants of IDoESE and IASESE. Similarly, IDoESE presenters and attendants may also attend the sessions of  IASESE according to their interests.

Doctoral students whose doctoral research involves a substantial empirical component are encouraged to submit a research plan for the symposium. Empirical work in the research can include experiments, case studies, surveys, or other empirical methods and data collection techniques, including a combination of them.

Best submitted plans will be selected for presentation and review. Ideally, doctoral students should have a clear idea of the research topic and research questions and they should already have spent time in designing and documenting their empirical studies or be in the process of analyzing the data. Normally, students reach this stage at their proposal stage, one to two years from the start of their doctoral studies.

The criteria used for selection will be the following, based on their initial submission (see later sections for details and schedule):

• Completeness of the empirical study design,

• Completeness of the research protocol (practical arrangements)

• Potential to benefit the researcher's doctoral thesis,

• Potential to act as a useful learning case for other participants,

• Relevance to software engineering research, and

• Recommendation of the supervising professor.

The selected students will be notified and invited to participate according to the schedule presented in section Deadlines of this page. Please, see the section Submission Guidelines for instructions on the specific content of the research plan.

Participants may co-attend the 4th International Advanced School of Empirical Software Engineering (IASESE 2006) can do that and attend the sessions in either of the events as they prefer. However, students of IDoESE are required to attend the session in which they are presenting, reviewing, or acting as a scribe. This event is targeted to those students that already have solid understanding of empirical methods and who have have detailed enough plans to be presented for feedback.

Doctoral students who submitted a plan but were not selected to present in the symposium are welcome to attend and review papers. They can also change their registration to IASESE 2006 or attend sessions in either event based on their personal preferences.

Submission guidelines

Prospective participants should prepare a concise version of their research plan, focusing on the following topics:

Topic or section	Recommended length
Abstract	< 250 words
1. Introduction and motivation - why is the research relevant - description of issues or points on which the author would like to get the most advice on	< 1 page
2. Relevant prior work - what is the work based on - what are the other relevant research results - what is the "research gap" that this research contributes to - it is sufficient to refer to main relevant work (note that there's only one page reserved for this)	< 1 page
3. Research Objectives, questions and hypotheses - explicit articulation of the research objectives (higher level goals for the research -- or a high-level research question) - explicit definition of the research hypotheses and questions (more specific statement of the claim or research questions) - rationale for them	< 4 pages
4. Empirical study design and arrangements - overall design of the study - description of study arrangements - description data collection procedures and protocols	< 5 pages
5. Definition of metrics - definition of metrics used in the study, include a list and definition of most important metrics	<3 pages
6. Data analysis methods - description of the methods and techniques used in data analysis	< 2 pages
7. Validity threats and control - description of potential threats and how they will be mitigated - how generalizeable the results are?	< 2 pages
Maximum number of pages (not including the list of references)	15 pages

Be as specific, clear and concise as you can as this way you will get most valuable feedback. Use a single column, single line space format of your choice. Recommended length is 10 pages.

Submit a PDF version your research plan to jyrki.kontio(at)tkk.fi according to the schedule presented in section Deadlines. Start the subject field text with the text IDoESE. Ask your supervisor to send the recommendation email to the same address as well.

Please note that the initial version of the plan (due at July 24) can be shorter, 3-5 pages.

Deadlines

The deadlines for the event are as follows

Registration and costs

Participants should register using the 2006 Experimental Software Engineering International Week (ESEIW 2006) registration system. 

This page is hosted by the Software Business Laboratory of Helsinki University of Technology at http://www.sbl.tkk.fi/idoese/