Book Review: Experimentation in Software Engineering: An Introduction. By Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C. Ohlsson, Björn Regnell and Anders Wesslén. Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, ISBN 0-7923-8682-5

Software engineering and its associated methods and techniques can offer none of the certainties of mathematics, and so it looks to empirical methods to offer the evidence needed by those given the task of evaluating and recommending such techniques. This book provides a detailed examination of the process of one available empirical strategy, experimentation, in the context of software engineering. Empirical methods, including experimentation, have been discussed and advocated for software engineering in a number of published papers. Few of these, however, have been explicit, practical, ‘how to’ guides. Experimenters have either needed to turn to other subjects with longer established track records in empirical studies (such as social science) and adapt as necessary, or glean what they could from descriptions of software engineering experiments. It has become apparent that in many cases there is a gap between the best practice of the discursive papers and the actuality of the experimental reports. This book is an attempt to fill that gap, and it does so successfully. Indeed, whilst it is acknowledged that there has been a delay between publication of the book and the appearance of this review, this is, in no small part, due to the popularity of the book among my undergraduate project students and also among some PhD students, from whom it was eventually retrieved, somewhat grubbier than when I first lent it out, and definitely well thumbed. This can be regarded as a commendation in itself. Its value to them has been to provide a single source of the information necessary to design, execute and analyse an experiment, relieving them of the task of reading a number of papers on various aspects of the subject and the subsequent task of attempting to form one coherent view from which to proceed. They also appreciated that, although thorough, the book is concise.