Foundations of Empirical Software Engineering

Although software engineering can trace its beginnings to a NATO conf- ence in 1968, it cannot be said to have become an empirical science until the 1970s with the advent of the work of Prof. Victor Robert Basili of the University of Maryland. In addition to the need to engineer software was the need to understand software. Much like other sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology, software engineering needed a discipline of obs- vation, theory formation, experimentation, and feedback. By applying the scientific method to the software engineering domain, Basili developed concepts like the Goal-Question-Metric method, the Quality-Improvement- Paradigm, and the Experience Factory to help bring a sense of order to the ad hoc developments so prevalent in the software engineering field. On the occasion of Basili's 65th birthday, we present this book c- taining reprints of 20 papers that defined much of his work. We divided the 20 papers into 6 sections, each describing a different facet of his work, and asked several individuals to write an introduction to each section. Instead of describing the scope of this book in this preface, we decided to let one of his papers, the keynote paper he gave at the International C- ference on Software Engineering in 1996 in Berlin, Germany to lead off this book. He, better than we, can best describe his views on what is - perimental software engineering.

Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

The Role of Experimentation in Software Engineering: Past, Current, and Future.- Programming Languages and Formal Methods.- A Transportable Extendable Compiler.- Iterative Enhancement: A Practical Technique for Software Development.- Understanding and Documenting Programs.- Measurement and GQM.- A Methodology for Collecting Valid Software Engineering Data.- The TAME Project: Towards Improvement-Oriented Software Environments.- The Software Engineering Laboratory.- Analyzing Medium-scale Software Development.- Software Process Evolution at the SEL.- The Software Engineering Laboratory - An Operational Software Experience Factory.- Learning Organization and Experience Factory.- Support for Comprehensive Reuse.- Technology Transfer at Motorola.- Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience.- Empirical Studies and Technical Development.- A Controlled Experiment Quantitatively Comparing Software Development Approaches.- Experimentation in Software Engineering.- Comparing the Effectiveness of Software Testing Strategies.- Cleanroom Software Development: An Empirical Evaluation.- Evolving and Packaging Reading Technologies.- Experience Base.- The Software Industry: A State of the Art Survey.- An Evaluation of Expert Systems for Software Engineering Management.- Software Defect Reduction Top-10 List.