The objective of course is to acquaint students with challenges, methods and approaches in empirical software engineering.

Students will gain theoretical knowledge of the various methods used to study complex phenomena that accompany the development of software products, such as designing empirical studies, e.g. experiments or case studies. The course will be of benefit to students who plan to engaged in research work in the field of software engineering, as well as future managers of quality in the software industry, which will be trained to use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to investigate software process.

The course covers the following topics: (1) a brief historical overview of empiricism in software engineering and motivation, (2) empirical software engineering methods through introduction of the relevant papers in the field, (3) a detailed review of qualitative and quantitative methods, (4) introduction to software metrics and measurement processes, and (5) the design of experiments in software engineering. Practical exercises will be designed as a series of experiments, students will apply the empirical methods discussed in class.

Lectures, laboratory exercises and exams. Lectures will be interactive and it will induced discussion of relevant topics through student presentations of exemplar papers in the field. On lab exercises, students will go through the entire process of designing an experiment, execution, data collection, and at the end of the data analysis and synthesis of the results.