Evidence-based Software Engineering

Reviewed by Christoph Csallner, Professor, University of Texas at Arlington on 5/22/24

Comprehensiveness rating: 5 see less

The book covers the data that is publicly available on building and maintaining software systems. The book is comprehensive in the sense that it systematically covers that available data. The book is not comprehensive in the sense that for some areas of software development there is little to no publicly available data. While other books may then instead report on private data, this book just omits such software development areas.

Content Accuracy rating: 5

The book is very accurate in the sense that the book's author also provides the underlying data and code. This allows readers to study the data and redo the data analysis. Specifically, the book's author maintains a public repository of the software engineering data the book discusses (in addition to the book author's own code for analyzing and visualizing that data) as a public GitHub repository (https://github.com/Derek-Jones/ESEUR-code-data).

Relevance/Longevity rating: 5

The book is up to date and the book's author has posted updates to the book's GitHub repository (https://github.com/Derek-Jones/ESEUR-code-data).

Clarity rating: 5

The writing is clear and tight. There is little (if any) fluff.

Consistency rating: 5

The writing is consistent.

Modularity rating: 5

The text is highly modular. Each section is broken into sub-sections and sub-sub-sections with their own descriptive titles. Paragraphs are compact and focused on the relevant point.

Organization/Structure/Flow rating: 5

The book's sections make sense.

Interface rating: 5

Text and figures are well laid out and are easy to read.

Grammatical Errors rating: 5

The text is well edited.

Cultural Relevance rating: 5

The book focuses on publicly available software development data and thus avoids the made-up worked examples commonly found in traditional textbooks.

I wish every book would provide this level of access to the data underlying the book.