Empirical studies

Empirical studies have become an important part of software engineering research
and practice. Ten years ago, it was rare to see a conference or journal article about
a software development tool or process that had empirical data to back up the
claims. Today, in contrast, it is becoming more and more common that software
engineering conferences and journals are not only publishing, but eliciting, articles
that describe a study or evaluation. Moreover, a very successful conference
(International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement),
journal (Empirical Software Engineering), and organization (International Software
Engineering Research Network) have all evolved in the last 10 years that focus
solely on this area. As a further illustration of the growth of empirical software
engineering, a search in the articles of 10 software engineering journals showed that
the proportion of articles that used the term “empirical software engineering” doubled
from about 6% in 1997 to about 12% in 2006