Ginger2: An Environment for Computer-Aided Empirical Software Engineering

ÐEmpirical software engineering can be viewed as a series of actions to obtain knowledge and a better understanding about some aspects of software development given a set of problem statements in the form of issues, questions or hypotheses. Our experience in conducting empirical software engineering from a variety of viewpoints for the last decade has made us aware of the criticality of integrating the various types of data that are collected and analyzed as well as the criticality of integrating the various types of activities that take place such as experiment design and the experiment itself. This has led us to develop a Computer-Aided Empirical Software Engineering (CAESE) framework as a substrate for supporting the empirical software engineering lifecycle. CAESE supports empirical software engineering in the same manner as a CASE environment serves as a substrate for supporting the software development lifecycle. This paper first presents the CAESE framework that consists of three elements. The first element is a process model for the alifecycleo of empirical software engineering studies, including needs analysis, experiment design, actual experimentation, and analyzing and packaging results. The second element is a model that helps empirical software engineers decide how to look at the aworldo to be studied in a coherent manner. The third element is an architecture based on which CAESE environments can be built, consisting of tool sets for each phase of the process model, a process management mechanism, and the two types of integration mechanism that are vital for handling multiple types of data: data integration and control integration. The second half of this paper describes the Ginger2 environment as an instantiation of our framework. The paper concludes with reports on case studies using Ginger2, which dealt with a variety of empirical data types including mouse and keystrokes, eye traces, threedimensional movement, skin resistance level, and video-taped data. Index TermsÐComputer-aided empirical software engineering (CAESE), empirical software engineering lifecycle, in vitro studies, CAESE environments, monitoring, analysis, measurement, human behavior.