ITR: Collaborative Research Proposal for a National Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research

要实现按时并在预算范围内构建更可靠的软件系统的目标，一个必要的步骤是建立一个制度化的经验学科，以了解影响系统构建的过程、组件和技术之间的因果关系。就像在物理和自然科学中一样，软件工程中的实验需要一个社区来支持协作、实验复制和改进以及实验数据和结果的共享。出于这些原因，经验软件工程研究中心(CESER)承担着原创的经验研究，并正在开发一个原型系统，以便与附属研究人员和从业者社区共享和发展此类研究的结果。CESER开发和改进技术以增加经验模型的描述性和预测力，并研究特定的软件开发技术以使行业组织能够了解这些技术在其特定背景下的优点和缺点。该中心提供关于经验方法和结果的课程和研讨会，并协助在软件工程教育中使用经验知识。该中心最初的重点是软件COTS集成和软件质量改进现象的实证研究。该中心最初是由马里兰大学、马里兰州弗劳恩霍夫中心、南加州大学、内布拉斯加州大学林肯分校和密西西比州立大学共同组织的。

A necessary step towards the goal of building more reliable software systems, on time and within budget, is to establish an institutionalized empirical discipline for understanding causal relationships among the processes, components, and technologies that affect the building of systems. As in the physical and natural sciences, experimentation in software engineering requires a community with support for collaboration, experimental replication and refinement, and sharing of experimental data and results.For these reasons the Center for Empirical Software Engineering Research (CESER) undertakes original empirical research and is developing a prototype system for sharing and evolving the results of such research with a community of affiliated researchers and practitioners. CESER develops and refines techniques to increase the descriptive and predictive power of empirical models, and studies specific software development technologies to enable industrial organizations to understand the benefits and drawbacks of those technologies in their specific context. The Center provides courses and symposia on empirical methodologies and results, and assists the use of empirical knowledge in software engineering education. The Center's initial focus is on empirical studies of software COTS integration and software quality improvement phenomenology.The center is initially organized as a collaborative effort among the University of Maryland, the Fraunhofer Center - Maryland, the University of Southern California, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and Mississippi State University.