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Using students as subjects - an empirical evaluation

Wed, 01/21/2009 - 06:54 — jvu
Author(s): Mikael Svahnberg, Aybüke Aurum, Claes Wohlin
Venue: ESEM '08: Proceedings of the Second ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
Date: 2008

Type of Experiement: Case Study
Class/Experience Level: Graduate Student

Quality
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The paper explores how students would imagine is important to professionals in requirements selection. The intentions mentioned in the paper are of twofold: 1) benchmark of "whether students have realistic expectations of industry practices" and 2) "allows us to further understand under which conditions students can be used in empirical investigations that are generalisable to a larger population of software engineering professionals." The paper concludes that there were no major differences and that "students have a good understanding of the way industry acts in the context of requirements selections, and students may work well as subjects in empirical students in this area."
Link: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1414055

Process Outline

  1. Week 1: Students answered individual questionnaire of their personal views and their perception of industry professionals' view
  2. Week 2: Subjects are assigned to nominal groups where the group's average is presented to each individual, and the subjects are encouraged to review their answers
  3. Week 3: A revised aggregate view is presented, and each group gets an aggregate of that group, and are encouraged to discuss their answers in the group an revise them accordingly
  4. Week 4: Aggregate view of all students are presented and compared with data from previous studies on industry practices

RESULTS
There were no major differences over the weeks indicating that the "subjects had a very stable view of their own opinions as well as that of industry professionals over the weeks" with correlations higher than 0.85.

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