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Critiques of the quantity and quality of empirical evaluations in software engineering have existed for quite some time. However such critiques are typically not empirically evaluated. This paper fills this gap by empirically analyzing papers published by ICSE, the prime research conference on Software Engineering. We present quantitative and qualitative results of a quasi-random experiment of empirical evaluations over the lifetime of the conference. Our quantitative results show the quantity of empirical evaluation has increased over 29 ICSE proceedings but we still have room to improve the soundness of empirical evaluations in ICSE proceedings. Our qualitative results point to specific areas of improvement in empirical evaluations.

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In this paper, we motivate examining software design decision making and provide the process by which the examination will occur. The objective is to provide qualitative results indicative of rational or naturalistic software design decision making. In a rational decision a decision maker evaluates decision alternatives and potential outcomes for each alternative using a utility function and probabilities of the outcome of each alternative. The utility function assigns a value to each possible alternative based on its outcome. The goal of rational decision making is selecting the optimal alternative. A naturalistic decision manifests itself in dynamic and continually changing conditions, embodies real-time reactions to these changes, embraces ill-defined tasks, and has a goal of selecting a satisfactory alternative. The proposed empirical qualitative study consists of inductive and deductive interviewing and deductive observations.

Abstract.There are few studies of how software developers make decisions in software design and none that places agile in the context of these decision making processes. In this paper, we present results of interviewing agile software developers and mentors to determine how design decision making aligns with rational decision making or naturalistic decision making. We present results of twelve case studies evaluating how agile professionals make design decisions, comparing mentor perspectives to developer perspectives. We describe our interview technique, content analysis used to analyze interview transcripts, and the interpretation of our results, to answer the question: how do agile designers make design decisions? Our results show that naturalistic decision making dominates design decision making but is supported by rational decision making.