Just a reminder: tomorrow I expect you to submit your (max) one page study description. Please provide the following three sections:

1. Research questions or research goals,
2. Data collection (including participant recruiting, if applicable), and
3. Data analysis.

Here are the details for the MSR study. Your report is due on March 20th in class. Good luck!

P.S. Remember that there will be no class on March 13th.

I've decided to give you two weeks to do the next study. So there will be no class on Tuesday March 13th. Your report for the MSR study (details coming soon) will be due in class on Tuesday March 20th.

Here are the details for the study for the week of February 28th:

http://sillito.github.com/se-lab/studies/stackoverflow.html

The study writeup mentions a paper by Kathleen Eisenhardt, please read that paper and be prepared to discuss it in class on February 28th.

Details for the systemtic review study are now posted. Please list the papers you select as comments to this blog post.

Instructions for how to analyze your interview data have been posted. One the week of February 6th you should be doing your analysis, and the background reading should be completed by class time February 7th. Your report on your analysis is due February 14th. Post questions below!

The study for this week will be an interview study focusing on computational science and engineering. To do this study you will likely need to recruit a participant from outside computer science. Post questions and/or suggestions about the study as comments to this blog post.

It is time to start planning for the next study. Your (max) one page report is due in class on January 24th. Please read over the study description carefully, but feel free to adapt the study as needed and don't let the specifics of the study description get in the way of doing good research.

If you have questions or comments about the study, please post a comment to this blog post.

For week one of the course, rather than conduct a study, please read the following two papers. Come on Tuesday January 17 ready to discuss the papers.

• Kitchenham, Pfleeger, Pickard, Jones, Hoaglin, El Emam and Rosenberg. Preliminary guidelines for empirical research in software engineering. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 28(8), August 2002.
• Timothy C. Lethbridge, Susan Elliot Sim and Janice Singer. Studying Software Engineers: Data Collection Techniques for Software Field Studies. Empirical Software Engineering, 10, 311-341, 2005.

Please also read the following paper in prepration for next weeks lab:

• Williams, Kessler, Cunningham and Jeffries. Strengthening the case for pair programming. IEEE Software, Aug 2000, 17(4), pages 19-45.

This course is based on a series of "labs" or small experiements, which are described here. Only the first few are list at the moment, but more are coming later.