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Common Threats and Mitigation Strategies in Requirements Engineering Experiments with Student Participants

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Book cover Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9619))

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Experiments are an important means to evaluate research results in the field of requirements engineering. Researchers often conduct such experiments with student participants. [Question/problem] The use of student participants evokes a multitude of potential threats to validity, which must be properly addressed by the chosen experiment design. In practice, attention is mostly given to threats to the generalizability of the findings. However, current experiment reports often lack a proper discussion of further threats, for example, which are caused by the recruitment of student participants. [Principle ideas/results] To provide mitigation strategies for student specific threats to validity, these threats must be known. We analyzed student experiments from published experiment reports to identify student specific threats and to analyze adequate mitigation strategies. [Contribution] This paper contributes a detailed analysis of the threats to validity to be considered in student experiments, and possible mitigation strategies to avoid these threats. In addition, we report on an experiment conducted in a university requirements engineering course, where we considered student specific threats and applied the proposed mitigation strategies.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research under grant no. 01IS12005C and grant no. 01IS15058C. Thanks to our industrial partners for their support in creating the experiment material used. In particular we thank Peter Heidl, Jens Höfflinger and John MacGregor (Bosch), Frank Houdek (Daimler), and Stefan Beck and Arnaud Boyer (Airbus).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. paluno – The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Marian Daun, Andrea Salmon, Torsten Bandyszak & Thorsten Weyer

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  1. Marian Daun
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  2. Andrea Salmon
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  3. Torsten Bandyszak
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  4. Thorsten Weyer
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Correspondence to Marian Daun .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Maya Daneva

  2. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Daun, M., Salmon, A., Bandyszak, T., Weyer, T. (2016). Common Threats and Mitigation Strategies in Requirements Engineering Experiments with Student Participants. In: Daneva, M., Pastor, O. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30282-9_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-30281-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-30282-9

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