Towards an Extensible Architecture for an Empirical Software Engineering Computational Platform

Abstract

One of the main objectives of Empirical Software Engineering is the improvement of methods, techniques, and tools for Software Engineering (SE) through the conduction and execution of experiments. Although research in empirical software engineering is well established in the literature, it is possible to verify that there are few supporting environments for conducting experiments, despite the increasing demand for this kind of study within the SE community. Moreover, existing approaches lack a number of important features, such as extensible mechanisms for the required phases of an experimentation in different domains of SE, integration with existing software development environments, ways to define metrics to be collected, automatic organization mechanisms to analyze collected data using a specific statistical analyzes method, and remote execution of experiments. This paper describes the SCCOPLA – an exten sible ar chitecture for empiri cal s oftware engineering com putational p latform. Our approach aims to address the aforementioned functionalities missing in available environments to conduct empirical SE studies. Preliminary results show its feasibility by applying an architecture-based tool to some of our previous software testing empirical studies.