Conducting On-line Surveys in Software Engineering

• Authors: Teade Punter;Marcus Ciolkowski;Bernd Freimut;Isabel John
• Venue: ISESE '03 Proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
• Year: 2003

One purpose of empirical software engineering is toenable an understanding of factors that influencesoftware development. Surveys are an appropriateempirical strategy to gather data from a large population(e.g., about methods, tools, developers, companies) and toachieve an understanding of that population. Althoughsurveys are quite often performed, for example, in socialsciences and marketing research, they areunderrepresented in empirical software engineeringresearch, which most often uses controlled experimentsand case studies. Consequently, also the methodologicalsupport how to perform such studies in softwareengineering, is rather low. However, with the increasingpervasion of the Internet it is possible to perform surveyseasily and cost-effectively over Internet pages (i.e., on-line),while at the same time the interest in performingsurveys is growing. The purpose of this paper is twofold.First we want to arise the awareness of on-line surveysand discuss methods how to perform these in the contextof software engineering. Second, we report ourexperience in performing on-line surveys in the form oflessons learned and guidelines.