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2002
Conference Paper
Titel
Families of experiments to summarize empirical findings
Abstract
For a growing population of researchers in software engineering, empirical studies have become a key approach of research. The software engineering community lacks a method to summarize results of several empirical studies. We argue that families of experiments with a common framework for collecting context data are necessary in order to summarize empirical findings at a useful level of detail. We describe a method to plan, conduct, and analyze coordinated families of experiments. It is being applied for an experiment family on the influence of context on the effectiveness of defect reduction techniques. As part of the experiment family, we recently conducted a large-scale survey on the state of the practice of inspections; first results are expected for the ISESE conference.