Software Engineering Research

Welcome to software engineering research field!

You possibly have been developing software for years and have just realized that you love it but you want to do something more than just finishing trivial tasks using conventional methods and tools.

Now you want to improve the way you do your challenging tasks. You want to complete them faster and with lower cost. You want to create innovative methods and tools to help other people systematically develop software. If this is true then software engineering research is waiting for you.

Please read

Although these books provide you a general view and a big picture of software engineering they do NOT give you every details about all the mentioned topics. Instead they present summaries about the key problems in software engineering and the most popular solutions to those problems.

In other words, these books prepare a background for you so that you could begin to do a software engineering research.

While reading these books you can also review all the topics on this website for detailed information of each topic these books mention.

After that please read this William M.K. Trochim (2006). Research Methods Knowledge Base book to get familiar with research terminologies, types and methods.

In order to begin to do a software engineering research you will need to get the idea of what may be investigated, how to conduct the investigation, what will be produced and how to ensure that what you have found is correct and useful.

It means that you should clarify

  • what is your research subject (Is it a laboratory experiment or a real world project?),
  • what is your unit of analysis (Is it a a software project or a requirement process or a design process or a testing process or a group of people or a model or a notation or a data structure or an algorithm?),
  • what is your research result (Is it a model or a method or a technique or a tool or a notation or an answer or an judgment?)
  • what you will do to your research subject and how you can obtain your research result (How do you collect and analyze data? How do you formalize or model or represent the problem? How do you formalize or model or present your solution?),
  • which method is used to validated your research result (Is it a mathematical proof or a controlled experiment or a case study?)

Please read the following papers to get knowledge about research subjects, research results, data collection and analysis, and research validation.

Then iteratively

  • Identify an appropriate problem. This is the most difficult task.
  • Identify research questions related to the problem.
  • Build your background knowledge related to the problem and research questions.
  • Check the literature for existing solutions.
  • Conduct the study (propose your solution to answer your research questions or solve the problem).
  • Document your solution.
  • Soberly and critically evaluate the effectiveness (i.e. the cost, the time, the fix) of your solution by comparing it with the existing solutions using benchmark inputs or prove the correctness of your solution using mathematical modeling and logical reasoning.

If you cannot identify a problem for your research then you can visit some of the sites below to look for your concrete interested research topics. Then select some papers that you are most interested in and read them.  Hopefully, you can identify some keywords that you are interested in (for example software architecture,  microservice architecture or multi-tenancy architecture) based on analyzing the papers.

Then conduct a systematic mapping study by:

    1. Selecting primary studies related to the keywords.
    2. Use below websites for searching for related works:
    3. Rigorously defining a classification framework,
    4. Applying the classification framework to the primary studies,
    5. Synthesizing the obtained data to produce an overview of the state of the art (which problems were solved, which problems are still unsolved).

Hopefully, at this point you can spot an unsolved problem that you are interested in.

Hope that you will have found a research problem, solved it, finished documenting and evaluating your solution. Then you will need to write your paper. Your paper must

  • Clearly articulate the topic of research,
  • Summarize the critical issues and current approaches used in the field,
  • Describe the proposed research concept, the intended methodology, the evaluation strategy, and results to date, and
  • Identify the contributions of the proposed work.

You can use the links below to check grammar for your paper if you are not a native English speaker:

You can use this Office2007_BibWord tool to manage your paper related work if you will be writing your paper using MS Word 2007 or MS Word 2010.

After that you will want to choose a conference and/or a publisher to publish your paper.  Please use the links below for this purpose.

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Software development and software engineering research