“For user studies in software engineering holds: it is better to have one user in the field, than ten in the lab.” Runkel & McGrath have proposed a four-quadrant taxonomy of empirical methods with two axes, obtrusive vs. unobtrusive and abstract vs. concrete. They further add three different criteria we might have for our methods, generalizability, precision, and realism. [1] Many artifacts in software engineering are validated with […]
Proposition #4
“If conferences and journals start to employ crowd reviewing, this will increase both the speed and quality of reviews” A bit of background for those not in academia, or even not in computer science, as publishing practices differ over different field. First of all, we CS people publish long papers with new results in conferences and […]
Proposition #3
The fact that papers are written for the audience of critical reviewers hinders adoption: possible users are not aware of academic mores and will be discouraged by described limitations. With adoption in this context, I mean that people outside of your direct group of colleagues and acquaintances will use your algorithm/tool/method. I pose that the way papers are written currently […]
Proposition #2
A method to encourage replication studies is to initiate a replication track, in which results from the previous edition are being challenged. Unfortunately, research today is mainly aimed at obtaining new results. I find this very strange, challenging new ideas is the heart of research and it is how much of the important scientific knowledge was […]
Proposition #1
The core reasons for the success of spreadsheets are their immediate feedback system and their continuous deployment model. Spreadsheets are enormously successful. It is estimated that 95% of all US companies use spreadsheets for financial reporting (1). In the eighties spreadsheets became “the medium, the method, the tool, and the language of financial analysis” (2) This success raises the […]
