Replications of software engineering experiments

Replication is an essential part of the experimental paradigm and is considered the main component of scientific knowledge. There are many open issues that must be addressed before the replication process can be successfully formalized in empirical software engineering research. The software engineering community learns a great deal from performing replications, reading reports of replications performed by others and aggregating the results of replications to draw deeper conclusions that would otherwise be possible. Experimental replications need to be published in the peer-reviewed literature to have scientific value comparable to that of other types of empirical studies. Significant efforts have been made to draw attention to the importance of publishing replications to advance the experimental research paradigm within software engineering and to provide a number of examples of such replications.