Seeds of Evidence: Integrating Evidence-Based Software Engineering

With increasing interest in evidence-based software engineering (EBSE), software engineering faculty face the challenge of educating future researchers and industry practitioners regarding the generation and use of EBSE results. We propose development and population of a community-driven Web database containing summaries of EBSE studies. We present motivations for inclusion of these activities in a software engineering course, and address the particular appeal of a community-driven Web database to students who have grown up in the Internet generation. We present our experience with integrating these activities into a graduate software engineering course, and report student and industry practitioner assessments of the resulting artifacts.