Ten years with evidence-based software engineering. What is it? Has it had any impact? What's next?

Abstract

An evidence-based software engineer is one who is able to: 1) Formulate a question, related to a decision or judgment, so that it can be answered by the use of evidence, 2) Collect, critically evaluate and summarise relevant evidence from research, practice and local studies, 3) Apply the evidence, integrated with knowledge about the local context, to guide decisions and judgments. The keynote reflects on what it in practise means to be evidence-based in software engineering contexts, where the number of different contexts is high and the research-based evidence sparse, and why there is a need for more evidence-based practises. We summarise our experience from ten years of Evidence-Based Software Engineering in the context of university courses, training of software engineers and systematic literature reviews of software engineering research. While there are challenges in training people in evidence-based practise, our experience suggest that it is feasible and that the training can make an important difference in terms of quality of software engineering judgment and decisions. Based on our experience we suggest changes in how evidence-based software engineering should be presented and taught, and how we should ease the transfer of research results into evidence-based practises.