Impact of Assessment of Empirical Studies Reliability: A Revisited Study

Abstract

Empirical studies are one of the main inputs of Evidence Based Software Engineering to generate a body of knowledge. For this reason, it is relevant to know the reliability of the results obtained by applying empirical methods before the aggregation of evidence. In a previous paper, results of empirical studies were added to confirm the influence of contextual attributes without evaluating their reliability. This article reviews that previous work but considering in the addition of results its reliability. For this reazon, an evaluation method, created by the authors was used to assess the mitigation of threats to validity of empirical studies. The results of this study show that when considering the reliability of empirical studies, the previous results vary significantly. This impact validation of evaluation method can help to be adopted and improved in empirical software engineering research.