Extracting Information from Experimental Software Engineering Papers

Experiments have been conducted to investigate analysis, design, implementation, testing, maintenance, quality assurance and reuse techniques, but, a body of evidence has not yet been built that enables a project manager to know with confidence what software processes produce what product characteristics and under what conditions. This paper extends an approach we proposed earlier to extract information from papers so that systematically analyzing results from several papers is possible. It also describes an in-vitro experiment we did with graduate students to validate the approach. The results show that the approach is feasible and can be taught to less experienced researchers.