Guest editors' introduction to the first issue on Experimental Software Engineering in the Cloud (ESEiC)

Highlights

• We clarify the background of the special issue.

• We provide an overview of related initiatives.

• We introduce the academic SHARE cloud which underpins the special issue.

• We summarize the two accepted papers.

Abstract

This inaugural Special Issue on Experimental Software Engineering in the Cloud (ESEiC) contributes to the further development of experimental software tools while also demonstrating ways in which the empirical evaluation of software engineering results can be improved. The open call for papers to this issue invited academic software developers to publish entire software environments together with a paper that focuses on the empirical evaluation of the related engineering techniques. Out of five submissions, two have been accepted. Both papers are the result of long term research efforts by multiple authors, and are supplemented by a multitude of software environments: all of the software engineering tools under study are available via virtual machines (VMs) in the academic SHARE cloud. The first paper cites 13 VMs, each containing one tool, while the second one cites one VM containing five tools under study. Both papers contribute new frameworks for comparing the tools under study. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first informatics journal issue that offers reproducible comparisons of such depth and breadth. In this editorial, we clarify the background of the special issue, introduce the SHARE cloud platform, and summarize the two papers.