Evidence-based Software Engineering

About the book

This book discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data. This aim is not as ambitious as it sounds, because there is not a great deal of data publicly available.
The intent is to provide material that is useful to professional developers working in industry; until recently researchers in software engineering have been more interested in vanity work, promoted by ego and bluster.
The material is organized in two parts, the first covering software engineering and the second the statistics likely to be needed for the analysis of software engineering data.

Available downloads

The complete book: 8 November 20, version 1.0, and mobile friendly pdf (layout can be shaky).

The code+data on Github (around 460M).

Errata listing known issues: 11 July 26,

Reporting issues using Github is good for general discussion, and makes it hard for me to ignore them (which I might do with email).

All referenced papers, and the bibtex file.

Slides and stuff for the workshops based on the second half of the book.

View all figures; includes links to original paper for the data and source code on Github.
Evidence-based software engineering

Discord channel

Invitation to the Evidence based software engineering channel.

Data discovered since publication

2022
2023
2024
2025

How to cite

The bibtex citation for the book is:
@Book{Jones_20b,
  author =       "Derek M. Jones",
  title =        "Evidence-based Software Engineering: based on the publicly available data",
  publisher =    "Knowledge Software, Ltd",
  ISBN =         "978-1-8382913-0-3",
  month =        nov,
  year =         "2020",
  data =         "website",
}

Available in dead tree form

Currently sold out. Amazon in the UK or USA.

Major changes

8 Nov 20 Release version 1.0

Send feedback to ESEUR "at" knosof dot co dot uk


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