Teaching Empirical Research Methods in Software Engineering: An Editorial Introduction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a book focused on teaching empirical research methods in software engineering, emphasizing the importance of education in aligning practice with the discipline's standards.

Contribution

It highlights the gap in teaching empirical methods in software engineering and sets the context for a comprehensive educational resource.

Findings

Empirical software engineering is a standard research practice.

Guidelines exist for conducting empirical studies.

Teaching methods for empirical software engineering are underdeveloped.

Abstract

Empirical Software Engineering has received much attention in recent years and became a de-facto standard for scientific practice in Software Engineering. However, while extensive guidelines are nowadays available for designing, conducting, reporting, and reviewing empirical studies, similar attention has not yet been paid to teaching empirical software engineering. Closing this gap is the scope of this edited book. In the following editorial introduction, we, the editors, set the foundation by laying out the larger context of the discipline for a positioning of the remainder of this book.