Five days of empirical software engineering: The PASED experience

Acquiring the skills to plan and conduct different kinds of empirical studies is a mandatory requirement for graduate students working in the field of software engineering. These skills typically can only be developed based on the teaching and experience of the students´ supervisor, because of the lack of specific, practical courses providing these skills. To fill this gap, we organized the first Canadian Summer School on Practical Analyses of Software Engineering Data (PASED). The aim of PASED is to provide - using a “learning by doing” model of teaching - a solid foundation to software engineering graduate students on conducting empirical studies. This paper describes our experience in organizing the PASED school, i.e., what challenges we encountered, how we designed the lectures and laboratories, and what could be improved in the future based on the participants´ feedback.