Evaluation studies of software testing research in Brazil and in the world: A survey of two premier software engineering conferences

This paper reports on a historical perspective of the evaluation studies present in software testing research published in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) in comparison to the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The survey characterizes the software testing-related papers published in the 25-year history of SBES, investigates the types of evaluation presented in these publications, and how the rate of evaluations has evolved over the years. A similar analysis within the same period is made for ICSE, allowing for a comparison between the national and international scenario. Results show that the rate of papers that present evaluation studies in SBES has significantly increased over the years. However, among the papers that described some kind of evaluation, only around 20% performed more rigorous evaluations (i.e. case studies, quasi experiments, or controlled experiments). Such percentage is low when compared to ICSE, which presented 40% of papers with more rigorous evaluations within the same period. Nevertheless, we noticed that both venues still lack the publication of research reporting controlled experiments: only a single paper in each conference presented this type of evaluation.

► We analyze all software testing papers published along 25 years in SBES and ICSE.
► Results show that few software testing papers present rigorous evaluation studies.
► The rate of testing papers with evaluation studies has increased over the years.