Research Method Track

                               Barbara Paech1, Roel Wieringa2
             1
              Heidelberg University, Germany, paech@informatik.uni-heidelberg.de
               2
                 University of Twente, Netherlands, R.J.Wieringa@utwente.nl




In 2015 REFSQ hosted for the first time a research method track. The track was
organized by the authors. It extended the empirical track from previous REFSQ
conferences to provide a forum for the exchange about research methods and their
application. While commonly accepted guidelines for experiments exist, there is
much more debate on how to conduct other forms of research studies: how to design,
plan and justify research, and how to ensure relevance, generalizability and
applicability to industry? Specific questions are for example: how to assess state-of-
art, how to generalize from empirical studies, and how to set up longitudinal studies?
   In response to the Call for Papers, four submissions were received All proposals
were independently reviewed by 3-4 members of the Program Committee, who
provided recommendation for acceptance or rejection. As a result of this process, two
submissions were accepted for presentation: one live-study and one mini-tutorial.
   The live-study Collecting Natural Language Trace Queries by Sugandha Lohar,
Jane Cleland-Huang, Alexander Rasin and Patrick Maeder aims at studying what kind
of information developers want to gain from traces between their software artefacts.
The mini-tutorial Focus Groups: Cost-effective and Methodologically Sound Ways to
Get Practitioners Involved in Your Empirical RE Research by Maya Daneva provides
an introduction to this very important requirements engineering technique which is
only rarely taught to students.
   In addition, the Research Method Track contains a session in which young
researchers can ask experiences experts in research methodology questions about the
structure and design of their own research. It is expected that this will be part of a
process of knowledge-sharing in which we continuously raise the standards of our
own research.
   We would like to thank the members of the REFSQ Program Committee and the
experts of the Panel for their volunteer work. Last, but not least, we gratefully
acknowledge the support from the local organizers.




 Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
 This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.

                                             206