Observational studies to accelerate process experience in classroom studies: an evaluation

Software engineering studies run in classroom environments can and have made important contributions to empirical software engineering. Because the goal of such studies is to improve the state of the practice in industry, researchers must understand and account for the differences between university students and industrial professionals. One major difference identified is the amount of training and practice that students and professional may have when learning a new technique. We propose and test a method of allowing university subjects to cost-effectively gain experience to compensate for this difference. The results show that the proposed method for gaining experience provided subjects with enough experience to improve their effectiveness in some but not all cases. There was also an indication from the results that the proposed method allowed the subjects to become more comfortable with a new technique.