Assessment method of empirical studies in software engineering

Abstract

— Empirical studies are one of the main inputs of Evidence-based Software Engineering to generate a body of knowledge. For this reason, it is important to know the reliability of the results applying empirical methods. This article presents a method that evaluates the reliability of empirical studies related to software engineering. For this, the authors considered aspects deal with the mitigation of threats to validity from scientific literature and generate an evaluation mechanism. The method is validated by applying it to a scientific article. Although the results seem to give a degree of reliability, it is necessary replicated in other studies to perform a calibration of the method.