Observational Studies to Accelerate Process Experience in Classroom Studies: An Evaluation

• Authors: Jeff Carver;Forrest Shull;Victor Basili
• Venue: ISESE '03 Proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
• Year: 2003

Software Engineering studies run in classroomenvironments can and have made important contributionsto empirical software engineering. Because the goal ofsuch studies is to improve the state of the practice inindustry, researchers must understand and account forthe differences between university students and industrialprofessionals. One major difference identified is theamount of training and practice that students andprofessional may have when learning a new technique.We propose and test a method of allowing universitysubjects to cost-effectively gain experience to compensatefor this difference. The results show that the proposedmethod for gaining experience provided subjects withenough experience to improve their effectiveness in somebut not all cases. There was also an indication from theresults that the proposed method allowed the subjects tobecome more comfortable with a new technique.