Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering

Abstract

For a long time scientists have been committed to describe and organize information acquired by observations from the field. To improve the comprehension and testability of the observed information, Bacon's works proposed to organize the way that the experiences should be structured and somehow formalized, starting with the experimental method idea. From that point in time, the ideas regarding experimentation have been explored and evolved into different scientific areas, including physics, agriculture, medicine, engineering and social sciences among others. It has not been different in Software Engineering. By applying the scientific method to organize their experimental studies, software engineers have intensively worked to understand the application and evolution of software processes and technologies. Acquiring knowledge through different categories of experimental studies has supported researchers and practitioners to build a Software Engineering body of knowledge. Families of studies start to be planned and shared among the research community, composing a common research agenda to enlarge such body of knowledge. Based on this, evidence based software engineering is becoming a reality. Nowadays, besides the experimental studies, the experimentation approach represents an important tool to allow the transfer of software technology to the industry and to improve software processes. This is the context for the 5th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering.This symposium provides an important vehicle for the further development of our understanding about the methods and application of experimentation in Software Engineering. It represents a concrete opportunity for our community to discuss the advances in the field and develop research collaboration in a face-to-face setting. I hope our Software Engineering community can use these good moments to go one step further, looking for ways to better spread knowledge regarding the scientific method (experimentation) and its application into the Software Engineering context.The fifth symposium in the ISESE series is part of the Experimental Software Engineering International Week (ESEIW). It is an honor to see the conference for the first time in Brazil. As started in the last ISESE issue, we have a full two-day program of three tracks in each day. This is the second year that we have had to organize the three tracks in order to accommodate the number of excellent papers submitted from different continents and accepted for publication.