Important Dates

Call for Participation

5th International Doctoral Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (IDoESE 2010)
Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, Sepember 15, 2010
During the 2010 International Empirical Software Engineering Week

Empirical work in software engineering has become substantially more prevalent since the 1990s and is now considered a fundamental requirement of high quality research in the field. This has also led to improvements in the quality and rigor in empirical software engineering research. The ISERN community, the ESEM conference and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal have been instrumental in advancing the standards in our area.

Doctoral students whose doctoral research involves a substantial empirical component are encouraged to submit a research plan for the symposium. Empirical work in the research can include experiments, case studies, surveys, or other empirical methods and data collection techniques, including a combination of them.

This symposium provides young researchers pursuing their doctoral research in software engineering with specific interest in using sound empirical methods with the opportunity to present their work and plans to more senior members in the empirical software engineering community. The objective is to improve the empirical designs and rigor in doctoral dissertations, share experiences and practices, and support the networking and cooperation within the community, in particular, between the promising young researchers and senior members of the community. Accepted papers will be published on the ESEM conference website. There will be an award for the best IDoESE paper based on the revised final papers.

Some of the most experienced members of the empirical software engineering community will provide feedback to students in this symposium. In addition, feedback will be given by other young researchers, to facilitate the exchange of ideas among young researchers.

Participation in the symposium is being solicited at three levels:

Participants are doctoral students, preferably around the mid-point in their dissertation work (i.e., at least 12 months from defending their dissertation, but have at least a preliminary research design), who will present their work at the symposium and receive feedback from the symposium advisors and other attendees.

Those wishing to be participants are asked to submit a paper (up to 12 pages in ACM format) on their research plan that includes

• Title and abstract (up to 250 words);
• Introduction (motivation, rationale, background) to the research;
• Description of issues or points on which the author would like to get the most advice on;
• Relevant prior work (foundations, relevant research results, research gap this work tries to fill);
• Research objectives, questions and hypotheses (with rationale);
• Research approach, empirical study design and arrangements;
• Definition of most important metrics (e.g., following the GQM approach);
• Data analysis methods and techniques;
• Validity threats and their control;
• Summary of the current status of the research and planned next steps;

In our experience specific, clear and concise papers will get the most valuable feedback.

Best submitted plans will be selected for presentation and review. Ideally, doctoral students should have a clear idea of the research topic and research questions and they should already have spent time in designing and documenting their empirical studies or be in the process of analyzing the data. Normally, students reach this stage at their proposal stage, one to two years from the start of their doctoral studies.

The criteria used for selection will be the following, based on their initial submission (see later sections for details and schedule):

• Completeness of the empirical study design,
• Completeness of the research protocol (practical arrangements)
• Potential to benefit the researcher's doctoral thesis,
• Potential to act as a useful learning case for other participants,
• Relevance to software engineering research, and
• Recommendation of the supervising professor.

Participation in the symposium requires the following:

• submitting and presenting a research plan,
• reviewing and commenting two research plans, and
• acting as a scribe in one review session.

Apprentices are also doctoral students, but at an earlier stage in their studies. Apprentices will attend the symposium and are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters, and will benefit from the feedback given to other students.

Observers are any other members of the empirical software engineering research community who would like to attend the symposium.