Title: Shall we shorten the Study Design Sections?

Chairs: Valentina Lenarduzzi, Davide Taibi

Goals:

Empirical studies, and in particular literature reviews, and case studies, are commonly reporting long and detailed sections to describe the methodology applied. While it might be very useful to have a self-contained paper, reviewers often mention the lack of readability of papers that are constantly rephrasing the methodology, only changing a limited set of variables.

An initial tentative of summarizing the methodology was proposed in the GQM Sheet. However, these sheets were used mainly as summaries or discussion points and did never take traction in the scientific community.

In this session, we would like to discuss possible methods for summarizing the methodology in short and conference papers.

Session structure:

Workshop. Presentation by the organizers and open discussion between the participants.

Expected session outcome and follow-up activity:

Set of possible schemas for a selected type of studies.