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).

View all figures; includes links to original paper for the data and source code on Github.

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.
Evidence-based software engineering

Available in dead tree form

Amazon in the UK or USA.

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",
}

Major changes

8 Nov 20 Release version 1.0
30 Jun 20 Polished everything, plus more data
29 Feb 20 Reworked source code chapter, and updated some other chapters, plus more data
29 Dec 19 Reworked reliability chapter, and updated earlier chapters
27 Oct 19 Reworked projects chapter
29 Aug 19 Reworked ecosystems chapter
30 May 19 Reworked cognitive capitalism chapter
24 Nov 18 Polished/corrected/fiddled with the eight statistical analysis related chapters
31 Jul 18 Source code chapter released
3 Apr 18 Reliability chapter released
26 Nov 17 Tweaks, plus updated with newly arrived data
27 Oct 17 Projects chapter released
17 Jul 17 Ecosystems chapter released
26 Mar 17 Cognitive capitalism chapter released
29 Jan 17 Human cognitive characteristics chapter released
17 Oct 16 Statistical analysis material released

Minor updates

13 Oct 20 Polished everything even more, plus more data
31 May 20 Polished/corrected/fiddled Software engineering chapters
29 Apr 20 Beta release of second half, the "data analysis" chapters, plus more data
25 Mar 20 Polished/corrected/fiddled Story/Probability/Statistics/Regression chapters
3 Mar 19 Polished/corrected/fiddled Human cognitive characteristics chapter
28 Oct 18 Survival analysis, circular statistics, compositional statistics and miscellaneous material polished.
29 Sep 18 Statistics, Regression and Time-series material polished.
1 Sep 18 Communications and Probability chapter polished.
2 Aug 18 Fixed non-figure html github hyperlinks and some minor stuff.
18 Feb 17 Fixed citation hyperlinks and added page number(s) on which citation is referenced to every citation.
Please send any feedback to ESEUR "at" knosof dot co dot uk


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