online software engineering study (win prizes)

[Alex Kotov]

Dear newsgroup readers,

I would like to ask for your help.

I'm a student at the Computer Science department of the Oregon
Graduate Institute. I have been following the developments in the Open
Source community for about 4 years and I've been fascinated with the
way Open Source movement works. I've been doing research in empirical
software engineering and I was wondering if the same principle that
drives the Open Software movement can work in other areas.

The main difficulty in empirical software engineering studies is the
great variability in people's performance (sometimes as much as 25:1),
which causes a lot of "noise" in analysis. Therefore studies with 30
or 40 participants are often just not powerful enough to get credible
results.

This gave me the idea of an "Open software engineering study". Using
the same principle utilized by the Open Source software, such studies
could leverage contributions of multiple participants spread all over
the world to overcome the "noise" problem and help us better
understand the effectiveness of different software engineering methods
and techniques. All the participants would have to do is connect to a
central web server and spend a little time performing some simple
software engineering tasks online. The large number of participants
would allow us to filter out the "noise" and make a justified
conclusion about which techniques work better under which
circumstances.

This kind of study has never been attempted before and some of the
professors on my committee are not convinced that such studies would
be able to attract enough volunteers to make them worthwhile.

This is where I need your help. I have put together a survey to find
out if there are enough people in the world who would like to make a
contribution to the field by participating in an internet-based
software engineering study. If you are interested in participating (or 
even if you are not), please take 10 minutes out of your busy schedule 
to take the survey. The results of this survey should either convince
my committee that online studies might work, or convince me that I'm
wasting my time working on them.

All people who take the survey will be entered in a drawing for
prizes. 

To take the survey, point your web browsers to

http://software-engineering.cse.ogi.edu/surv/driver.cgi?R=AG

If you have any questions or comments please email me at
kotov at cse.ogi.edu or call (503)748-7385. If you know someone who might
be interested in participating, please pass this information to them!

Thank you for your time,

Alex Kotov

Pacific Software Research Center
Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology