An Analysis of Tool-Based Research in Software Engineering

Many research approaches in software engineering propose models or extensions to existing models. This includes system models, such as UML models, and project management artifacts, such as bug reports or tasks. For evaluating a research approach these models have to be implemented. Existing tools often lack the required extensibility and do not support data collection and analysis. Therefore, many researchers have to spend significant effort on the implementation. In this paper, we identify common requirements for a platform to build research tools on and we evaluate them based on potential use for recent publications. To evaluate the relevancy of the requirements we reviewed 274 research papers from the software engineering category of two major conferences over the last two years. We found 38 research approaches among those that would have benefited from a common platform with the presented requirements.