Identifying Practitioners' Arguments and Evidence in Blogs: Insights from a Pilot Study

Background: researchers have a limited understanding of how practitioners conceive of and use evidence. Objective: to investigate how to automatically identify practitioner arguments and evidence in a corpus of practitioner documents, and identify insights for further work. Method: we develop, apply and evaluate a preliminary process to identify practitioner arguments and factual stories, based on the presence of specific words, using a sample of 1,022 blog posts from a software practitioner's blog. Results: we identify unanswered questions relating to the process: selecting and scraping data, cleansing data, parsing components of arguments and stories, selecting the 'right' cases, and validating and interpreting the results. Conclusion: our work provides a foundation for more substantive research on identifying practitioners' evidence and arguments that, in turn, can support research in other areas e.g. evidence informed software practice.