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The Summer School on Empirical Research Methods in Software Engineering and Informatics (ERMSEI) is coming to France for the first time!

Running mostly annually since 2013, the ERMSEI Summer School is the place to go if you are a junior researcher and want to start doing empirical work in a Software Engineering or Informatics context but don’t know how or lack a local support system. In 2025, we’re hosted at the Centre de recherche Inria (IRISA), in beautiful Rennes (France).

Goal

The goal of this summer school is to get junior researchers started on using empirical research methods on software engineering topics. We emphasize practical, hands-on exercises throughout the course because that is the only way to really get going. We focus on providing overview rather than details: those are better learned by reading specialized books. We will try to work on your research topics as much as possible, delivering real and immediate value to participants.

Topics

We will cover all major research methods, i.e., controlled experiments, a selection of qualitative methods, and the major approaches to secondary research. We will also discuss study design as the most important obstacle to high quality empirical research, but we will not cover statistics or specialized tools such as R. The whole summer school is based on case studies of actual published empirical research, and quite possibly your own research projects.