The struggle is real! The agony of recruiting participants for empirical software engineering studies

Empirical software engineering researchers are committed to investigating better ways of improving software engineering practice. To do this, gathering data about software professionals’ experiences and perspectives on the researched topic is crucial. However, in the last decade, our experience of recruiting software professionals as potential participants in our studies has met with fluctuating success. Therefore, we had to explore multiple possibilities when recruiting participants. This cost us more effort and time than anticipated. In this paper, we briefly discuss the challenges we faced when recruiting participants for empirical research in software engineering, the solutions we implemented to address these challenges, and a concise list of strategies for garnering the interest of potential participants.