Exploring web advertising to attract industry professionals for software engineering surveys

The validity of questionnaire-based surveys in empirical software engineering studies depends on the number of survey participants and the quality of the data collected from participants. Attracting respondents is a continuous challenge and many studies rely on participants from the personal network of researchers. In this short paper we present several insights from using web advertising to recruit participants for one of our surveys on software architecture decision making. More specifically, in this work we show how we used web advertising in addition to contacting our personal networks, postings on mailing lists, blogs, etc. to reach a larger and broader base of our target population. We discuss the lessons we learned through this experience, and potentials and trade-offs of using web advertising in software engineering surveys.