The Importance of Using Empirical Evidence in Software Engineering
Enrique Fernández, Óscar Dieste, Patricia Mabel Pesado, Ramón García Martínez · LA Referencia (Red Federada de Repositorios Institucionales de Publicaciones Científicas) · 2011
Experiments that are run with few experimental subjects are often considered not to be very reliable and deemed, as a result, to be useless with a view to generating new knowledge. This belief is not, however, entirely correct. Today we have tools, such as meta-analysis, that we can use to aggregate small-scale experiments and output results that are equivalent to experiments run on large samples that are therefore reliable. The application of meta-analysis can overcome some of the obstacles that we come up against when running software engineering experiments (such as, for example, the practitioner availability problem).