The Price of Using Students Comments on Empirical software engineering experts on the use of students and professionals in experiments

10/25/2018
by   Dag I. K. Sjøberg, et al.
0

In a recent article, Falessi et al. (2017) call for a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of using students and professionals in experiments. The authors state: we have observed too many times that our papers were rejected because we used students as subjects. Good experiments with students are certainly a valuable asset in the body of research in software engineering. Papers should thus not be rejected solely on the ground that the subjects are students. However, the distribution in skill is different for students and professionals. Since previous studies have shown that skill may have a moderating effect on the treatment of participants, we are concerned that studies involving developers with only low to medium skill (i.e., students) may result in wrong inferences about which technology, method or tool is better in the software industry. We therefore provide suggestions for how experiments with students can be improved and also comment on some of the alleged drawbacks of using professionals that Falessi et al. point out.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
10/25/2018

The Price of Using Students

In a recent article, Falessi et al. (2017) call for a deeper understandi...
research
07/08/2020

Study on Computational Thinking as Problem-solving Skill: Comparison Based on Students Mindset in Engineering and Social Science

One of the capabilities which 21st-century skill compulsory a person is ...
research
08/15/2017

Controlled Experiments with Student Participants in Software Engineering: Preliminary Results from a Systematic Mapping Study

[Context] In software engineering research, emphasis is given to sound e...
research
05/29/2023

Screening with Disadvantaged Agents

Motivated by school admissions, this paper studies screening in a popula...
research
12/08/2022

A study of the design and documentation skills of industry-ready CS students

An engineer in a product company is expected to design a good solution t...
research
03/24/2021

Is it Possible to Disregard Obsolete Requirements? A Family of Experiments in Software Effort Estimation

Context: Expert judgement is a common method for software effort estimat...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset