Teaching Empirical Research Methods in Software Engineering: An Editorial Introduction
Daniel Mendez, Paris Avgeriou, Marcos Kalinowski, Nauman bin Ali
TL;DR
The paper addresses the gap in EMSE education by articulating the need for formal teaching of empirical methods in software engineering. It presents an editorial synthesis that defines EMSE, advocates a pragmatic, iterative cycle for theory building, and highlights the epistemological diversity and replication as central to robust practice. It catalogs the educational challenges and outlines the book's structure to provide a generic, adaptable foundation for course design, supplemented by practical resources and an online repository. The work aims to equip educators with a community-driven, shareable set of materials and guidance to foster empirical reasoning and data-driven decision making in software engineering education.
Abstract
Empirical Software Engineering has received much attention in recent years and became a de-facto standard for scientific practice in Software Engineering. However, while extensive guidelines are nowadays available for designing, conducting, reporting, and reviewing empirical studies, similar attention has not yet been paid to teaching empirical software engineering. Closing this gap is the scope of this edited book. In the following editorial introduction, we, the editors, set the foundation by laying out the larger context of the discipline for a positioning of the remainder of this book.