Instructors

David Budgen, Durham University
Pearl Brereton, Keele University

Abstract

Context: A consequence of the growing number of empirical studies in software engineering is that both researchers and practitioners need to be able to construct an objective summary of research evidence that is drawn from related studies. This requires that we adopt systematic approaches to the problem of assessing and aggregating the outcomes from a potentially heterogeneous set of empirical studies, since in Software Engineering, such studies may employ very different experimental forms and be undertaken in very different experimental contexts.

Objectives: To provide participants with an introduction to the role, form and processes involved in performing Systematic Literature Reviews. At the end of the tutorial, participants should be able to both read and use such reviews, as well as possess the knowledge needed to conduct systematic reviews of their own.

Method: We propose to use a blend of information presentation (including some experiences of the problems that can arise in the software engineering domain), and also of interactive working, using review material prepared in advance.

Biographies

David Budgen is Professor of Software Engineering at Durham University, and until recently, was Professor of Software Engineering at Keele University. A long-term research interest has been the study of software design practices, and he is the author of the textbook "Software Design" published by Pearson Addison Wesley. Over the years this has led to an increasing interest in empirical techniques, particularly for studying design activities, and he is currently principal investigator on the Evidence Based Software Engineering (EBSE) project. He has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students for 25 years, as well as having had experience of running advanced courses on software design for the staff training programme of a major software developer. He has run workshops on Evidence-Based Software Engineering at STEP2002 (Montreal) and STEP2003 (Amsterdam), and with Professor Kitchenham he ran the very successful Realising Evidence Based Software Engineering workshop at ICSE 2005.

Pearl Brereton is Professor of Software Engineering at Keele University. Her research interests are in Component-based Systems and Interdisciplinary Software Engineering, with a particular current focus on evidence-based software engineering. She has been teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students for over 15 years and has been responsible for a number of long running courses covering empirical techniques and their use in software development and evaluation.
In November 2004, she organised and led (with N. Mehandjiev, The University of Manchester) an international ACM Workshop on Interdisciplinary Software Engineering research, which was co-located with the 12th International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (SIGSOFT/FSE-12), at Newport Beach, California.
She has previously co-organised and facilitated workshops on Interdisciplinary Software Engineering at 10th Annual International Workshop on Software Technology and Engineering Practice (STEP2002) held in Montreal and at STEP2003 held in Amsterdam. She has recently completed a systematic review of literature relating to service-based software engineering.