Using students as subjects - an empirical evaluation

ABSTRACT

An important task in Requirements Engineering is to select which requirements that should go into a specific release of a system. This is a complex decision that requires balancing multiple perspectives against each other. In this article we investigate what students imagine is important to professionals in requirements selection. The reason for this is to understand whether the students are able to picture what industry professionals value, and whether the courses allow them to picture the state of industry practice. The results indicate that students have a good understanding of the way industry acts in the context of requirements selection, and students may work well as subjects in empirical studies in this area.

REFERENCES

• 1: Aybüke Aurum , Claes Wohlin, Engineering and Managing Software Requirements, Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2005
• 2: Patrik Berander, Using Students as Subjects in Requirements Prioritization, Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, p.167-176, August 19-20, 2004 [doi>10.1109/ISESE.2004.34]
• 3: Jeffrey Carver , Letizia Jaccheri , Sandro Morasca , Forrest Shull, Issues in Using Students in Empirical Studies in Software Engineering Education, Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Software Metrics, p.239, September 03-05, 2003
• 4: J. Carver, L. Jaccheri, S. Morasca, and F. Schull. Using empirical studies during software courses. In R. Conradi and A. Wang, editors, Empirical Methods and Studies in Software Engineering, Experiences from ESERNET, Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 2765, Berlin Germany, 2003. Springer Verlag.
• 5: Martin Höst , Björn Regnell , Claes Wohlin, Using Students as Subjects—A Comparative Study ofStudents and Professionals in Lead-Time Impact Assessment, Empirical Software Engineering, v.5 n.3, p.201-214, November 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1026586415054]
• 6: H. Linstone and M. Turoff, editors. The Delphi Method - Techniques and Applications. Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., Reading MA, 1975.
• 7: P. Runeson. Using students as experimental subjects - an analysis of graduate and freshmen student data. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Empirical Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2003), pages 95--102, 2003.
• 8: Dag I. K. Sjberg , Bente Anda , Erik Arisholm , Tore Dybå , Magne Jrgensen , Amela Karahasanovic , Espen F. Koren , Marek Vokác, Conducting Realistic Experiments in Software Engineering, Proceedings of the 2002 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, p.17, October 03-04, 2002
• 9: Walter F. Tichy, Hints for Reviewing Empirical Work in Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, v.5 n.4, p.309-312, December 2000 [doi>10.1023/A:1009844119158]
• 10: C. Wohlin and A. Aurum. What is important when deciding to include a software requirement into a project or release. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, Noosa Heads, Australia, 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications
          Subjects: Methodologies (e.g., object-oriented, structured)

General Terms:
Experimentation, Management

Keywords:
education, empirical, industry practice, requirements engineering, students