This course provides an overview and hands-on experience with a core of qualitative and quantitative empirical research methods, including interviews, qualitative coding, survey design, and large-scale mining and analysis of data. There will be extensive reading with occasional student presentations about the reading in class, weekly homework assignments, and a semester-long research project for which students must prepare in-class kickoff and final presentations as well as a final report.

We will focus on software-engineering related research questions in readings and assignments. Students will mine and integrate data from and across online software repositories (e.g., GitHub and Stack Overflow) and employ a spectrum of data analysis techniques, ranging from statistical modeling to social network analysis. For the final research project, we encourage students to come up with a research question of interest to themselves. The delivery will be a research paper, and one or more empirical methods presented in class have to be part of the paper.