Open Source Software

Empirical research is quite difficult undertaking; doing empirical research becomes even more difficult when the studied objects are likely to be described at a higher level of abstract like software architecture. That is an obvious reasons that we don’t see much empirical research, even not very rigorous one, carried out to assess the effectiveness and efficiencies of the methods, techniques, and tools developed to support the software architecture process over the last 20 years. However, there is an increasing realization that anecdotal claims are not sufficient for making claims about the goodness of our research outputs; rather, we need to provide systematically gathered evidence rather than anecdotes or rhetoric to promote the use of a particular method or tool that purports to support any of the software engineering activity. Patricia, Arie, I decided to put together a special issue the topic of empirical research in software architecture: opportunities, challenges, and approaches. We approaches the empirical software engineering journal for this special issue. It is great feeling of satisfaction and pleasure that we have finalized the special issue with four high quality papers. There were several people involved in this process that lasted more than two years and we are greatly thankful to all of them. The articles included in the special issue are:Read More »Empirical research in software architecture