Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Santos, Paulo Sérgio Medeiros dos
• Travassos, Guilherme Horta

Titel

Action Research Can Swing the Balance in Experimental Software Engineering

Ist Teil von

• Advances In Computers, 2011, Vol.83, p.205-276

Ort / Verlag

United States: Elsevier Science & Technology

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• In general, professionals still ignore scientific evidence in place of expert opinions in most of their decision making. For this reason, it is still common to see the adoption of new software technologies in the field without any scientific basis or well-grounded criteria, but on the opinions of experts. Experimental Software Engineering is of paramount importance to provide the foundations to understand the limits and applicability of software technologies. The need to better observe and understand the practice of Software Engineering leads us to look for alternative experimental approaches to support our studies. Different research strategies can be used to explore different Software Engineering practices. Action Research can be seen as one alternative to intensify the conducting of important experimental studies with results of great value while investigating the Software Engineering practices in depth. In this chapter, a discussion on the use of Action Research in Software Engineering is presented. As indicated by a technical literature survey, along the years a growing tendency for addressing different research topics in Software Engineering through Action Research studies has been seen. This behavior can indicate the great potential of its applicability in our scientific field. Despite their clear benefits and diversity of application, the initial findings also revealed that the rigor and control of such studies should improve in Software Engineering. Aiming at better explaining the application of Action Research, an experimental study ( in vivo) on the investigation of the subjective decisions of software developers, concerned with the refactoring of source code to improve source code quality in a distributed software development context is depicted. A Software Engineering theory regarding refactoring and some guidance on how to accomplish an Action Research study in Software Engineering supplement the discussions in this chapter.