Introduction to the EASE 2016 special section: Evidence-based software engineering: Past, present, and future

The International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) had its twentieth anniversary in 2016, with that year's edition hosted in Limerick, Ireland. Founded in 1997, the EASE conference was the first event solely dedicated to encouraging empirical research in software engineering, and its founders have been longtime advocates of evidence-based software engineering (EBSE). In this editorial, we briefly look back at the history of EBSE and the EASE conference. We then introduce the four articles which are revised and extended versions of papers presented at EASE 2016. We conclude by looking at the future of EBSE, and provide some suggestions for conducting and reporting empirical research.