Memorias de investigación
Communications at congresses:
Quantitative Determination of the Relationship between Internal Validity and Bias in Software Engineering Experiments: Consequences for Systematic Literature Reviews
Year:2011
Research Areas
  • Information technology and adata processing
Information
Abstract
Quality assessment is one of the activities performed as part of systematic literature reviews. It is commonly accepted that a good quality experiment is bias free. Bias is considered to be related to internal validity (e.g., how adequately the experiment is planned, executed and analysed). Quality assessment is usually conducted using checklists and quality scales. It has not yet been proven;however, that quality is related to experimental bias. Aim: Identify whether there is a relationship between internal validity and bias in software engineering experiments. Method: We built a quality scale to determine the quality of the studies, which we applied to 28 experiments included in two systematic literature reviews. We proposed an objective indicator of experimental bias, which we applied to the same 28 experiments. Finally, we analysed the correlations between the quality scores and the proposed measure of bias. Results: We failed to find a relationship between the global quality score (resulting from the quality scale) and bias; however, we did identify interesting correlations between bias and some particular aspects of internal validity measured by the instrument. Conclusions: There is an empirically provable relationship between internal validity and bias. It is feasible to apply quality assessment in systematic literature reviews, subject to limits on the internal validity aspects for consideration.
International
Si
Congress
ESEM - International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
960
Place
Banff, Albert (CANADA)
Reviewers
Si
ISBN/ISSN
978-1-4577-2203-5
Start Date
19/09/2011
End Date
23/09/2011
From page
285
To page
294
ESEM 2011 Fifth International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
Participants
  • Autor: Oscar Dieste Tubio UPM
  • Autor: Anna Grimán Dept. Procesos y Sistemas. Universidad Simón Bolívar. Caracas, Venezuela
  • Autor: Natalia Juristo Juzgado UPM
  • Autor: Himanshu Saxena Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Research Group, Departaments and Institutes related
  • Creador: Grupo de Investigación: Ingeniería del Software