Guidelines for empirical work in software engineering

The goal of the workshop series on empirical software engineering is to have discussions on issues related to current software engineering research and practice. Nowadays, SE technologies are employed that frequently lack sufficient evidence regarding their suitability, their limits, qualities, costs, and inherent risks. This supports the provision that evidence is becoming more and more important for practitioners and academics to support arguments and decisions in research as well as software engineering practice. The advent of the evidence-based software engineering paradigm causes the importance of the aggregation of empirical results. A major discussion with regard to this issue is concentrated on the question of understanding how different types of studies can effectively improve our understanding of a methodology's strengths and weaknesses. Within the workshop "Guidelines for empirical work in Software Engineering" issues with regard to the aggregation of a deeper understanding of what we know were discussed. The main result from the workshop is the identification of a need for a reporting standard for empirical work to ensure that the investments pay of. The information need from the perspective of both practice and academia was discussed as well as measures for enacting guidelines. Finally, a proposal for a reporting guideline for controlled experiments was discussed The workshop itself was the third one in the workshop series on empirical Software Engineering. The first one was held in conjunction with PROFES 2002 in Rovaniemi, the second one was held in conjunction with the Empirical Software Engineering International Week 2003 in Rome.