Guidelines for applying research results

The software engineering literature is full of research reports that relate the conclusions of case studies, surveys, and formal experiments. But it is not always easy to tell which results apply to you. When results conflict, how do you know which study to believe? To understand how to sort through these studies, and decide if you should perform your own study, the author has put together the Non-Trivial Pursuits game board, that tells you when you have enough information to draw a valid conclusion about a relationship between factors. To begin, suppose your project team is interested in improving the quality of the code it produces. You want to determine what factors improve quality so that your team can use appropriate techniques or tools to generate better code. Your first attempt to find out what affects code quality is to examine population studies, in which characteristics of a large developer population are examined for associations among variables.