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Empirical Software Engineering Research - The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Software Engineering Research community has slowly recognized that empirical studies are an important way of validating ideas and increasingly our community has stopped accepting the sufficiency of arguing that a smart person has come up with the idea and therefore it must be good. This has led to a flood of Software Engineering papers that contain at least some form of empirical study. However, not all empirical studies are created equal, and many may not even provide any useful information or value. We survey the gradual shift from essentially no empirical studies, to a small number of ones of questionable value, and look at what we need to do to insure that our empirical studies really contribute to the state of knowledge in the field. Thus we have the good, the bad, and the ugly. What are we as a community doing correctly? What are we doing less well than we should be because we either don't have the necessary artifacts or because the time and resources required to do "the good" is perceived to be too great? And where are we missing the boat entirely in terms of not addressing critical questions and often not even recognizing that these questions are central even if we don't know the answers. We look to see whether we can find some commonality in the projects that have really made the transition from research to widespread practice to see whether we can identify some common themes.