Paper Info
Title
Four commentaries on the use of students and professionals in empirical software engineering experiments.
Abstract
I welcome the contribution from Falessi et al. [1] hereafter referred to as F++ , and the ensuing debate. Experimentation is an important tool within empirical software engineering, so how we select participants is clearly a relevant question. Moreover as F++ point out, the question is considerably more nuanced than the simple dichotomy it might appear to be at first sight. This commentary is structured as follows. In Section 2 I briefly summarise the arguments of F++ and comment on their approach. Next, in Section 3, I take a step back to consider the nature of representativeness in inferential arguments and the need for careful definition. Then I give three examples of using different types of participant to consider impact. I conclude by arguing, largely in agreement with F++, that the question of whether student participants are representative or not depends on the target population. However, we need to give careful consideration to defining that population and, in particular, not to overlook the representativeness of tasks and environment. This is facilitated by explicit description of the target populations.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1007/s10664-018-9655-0
Empirical Software Engineering
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
23
6
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1382-3256
5
0.43
References 
Authors
0
12
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert Feldt1965.77
Thomas Zimmermann25947271.61
Gunnar R. Bergersen3404.35
Davide Falessi450434.89
Andreas Jedlitschka538938.38
Natalia Juristo61613149.23
Jürgen Münch71286147.27
Markku Oivo865081.11
Per Runeson92869144.10
Martin Shepperd103274187.42
Dag I. K. Sjøberg1190495.31
Burak Turhan12106850.58