Barbara A. Kitchenham. Synthesising Research Results. In Victor R. Basili, H. Dieter Rombach, Kurt Schneider, Barbara A. Kitchenham, Dietmar Pfahl, Richard W. Selby, editors, Empirical Software Engineering Issues. Critical Assessment and Future Directions, International Workshop, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, June 26-30, 2006. Revised Papers. Volume 4336 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 101, Springer, 2006. [doi]
I am currently working on the Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) project (EP/C51839X/1) awarded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. We are investigating how readily the concept of evidence-based practice can be adapted to Software Engineering. Evidence-based practice relies on research synthesis, aggregating and analysing relevant ‘primary studies’ by using the methodology of systematic literature reviews. Much of the original impetus came from medical research and emphasised synthesis of high-quality quantitative experiments (i.e. double-blind randomised controlled trials) using statistical metaanalysis.