Victor R. Basili and Koji Torii, Workshop Co-chairs
We were delighted to hold our third workshop in the series and are grateful to all those who contributed to its success. Once again we learned about the enormous differences in the meaning of data based upon the characteristics of the different organizations, their different processes, their different goals, their different cultures.
We first organized the workshop three years ago because we felt that there were may open questions with regard to software engineering data and its analysis in practice. Although data has been used by many organizations, the meaning of the data, the way it is analyzed, and the way it is interpreted, is still difficult to understand out of the context of the organization and even sometimes within the organization.
Software development is still an immature field when it comes to data analysis. Many organizations have tried to benchmark each other without truly understanding the context of the data and the meaning of the results. This has led to misconceptions and misunderstandings and difficulty in moving "best practices" from one organization to another.
The purpose of this series of workshops has been to expose these issues to organizations that collect, analyze and use software engineering type data, try to share knowledge and experience, problems and concerns about data collection, validation, analysis, and use, among a group of experienced, participating organizations.
This year again, although we asked everyone to bring data and provided a questionnaire for defining the context for that data. Aside from the problems of confidentiality, it was again next to impossible to combine that data into meaningful categories for cross organizational analysis. However, as before, there was an open discussion among the participants, allowed us to gain insights into the goals and purposes for collection and analysis of the different organizations and the potential meanings in context.
WWW page updated 01-Feb-96 by Jyrki Kontio