Research synthesis in software engineering: a case for meta-analysis

Abstract

The use of meta-analytic techniques to summarize empirical software engineering research results is illustrated using a set of 5 published experiments from the literature. The intent of the analysis is to guide future work in this area through objective summarization of the literature to date. A focus on effect magnitude, in addition to statistical significance is championed, and the reader is provided with an illustration of simple methods for computing effect magnitudes.