SEEWeb: making experimental artifacts available

This position paper suggests that some of the technical and methodological challenges facing software testing researchers can be addressed by establishing a repository of experimental software artifacts, in particular, artifacts that are related to software testing empirical research. We introduce the Software Engineering Experiments on the Web (SEEWEB) project, a Web site that is created to be a convenient and usable infrastructure for gathering, organizing, and distributing experimental software artifacts. A common problem in designing software engineering and software testing experiments is finding experimental artifacts that are appropriate for the experiment, convenient to gather and use, and will fit with other experimental artifacts. SEEWEB was initially funded by the NSF and is offered as a service to the community and provides access to experimental artifacts through an interface that allows browsing, searching and downloading. SEEWEB loosely follows the open-source philosophy; experimental artifacts are provided by researchers on an as-is basis with the only payment being citations and acknowledgments to the contributing researchers. SEEWEB can be accessed online through the URL http://www.ise.gmu.edu/seeweb/.