CI-EN: Collaborative Research: TraceLab Community Infrastructure for Replication, Collaboration, and Innovation

这是TraceLab项目的第二阶段，该项目最初是由NSF重大研究仪器拨款资助的。该项目的目标是提供一种工具，以促进软件工程实验的重现性，促进比较评估，并提供一个可以在研究小组之间轻松共享组件的环境。几乎所有的科学和工程学科都面临着实验重复性的挑战。最近，由生物技术公司“安进”进行的一项广泛报道的研究显示，在之前发表的53篇里程碑式的论文中，只有6篇是可复制的。最近的研究已经在不同的软件工程领域发现了类似的问题，包括但不限于软件可跟踪性、功能定位和编译器优化。由于缺乏公开可用的数据集、过时和不可用的工具、关于实验的不足细节以及关于各种指标计算方式的未记录决定，重复性经常受到破坏。TraceLab提供了即插即用的实验环境，以及可共享的组件库和开创性的实验。因此，它旨在解决这些问题。TraceLab引入了一种截然不同的方法来处理经验式软件工程研究，并为更好的社区协作、更严格的结果评估和新研究人员更容易的进入铺平了道路。预计它将为经验软件工程领域的未来进展奠定基础，加速和塑造未来的研究方向，支持工业试点研究，并显著降低通常阻碍新研究人员进入该领域的成本和努力。此外，该项目将为不同的本科生和研究生群体提供机会，并将用于各种软件工程课程的教育目的。

This is the second phase of the TraceLab project, which was initially funded under an NSF Major Research Instrumentation grant. The goal of this project is to deliver an instrument that facilitates reproducibility of Software Engineering experiments, fosters comparative evaluation, and provides an environment in which components can be easily shared across research groups. The challenge of experimental reproducibility extends across almost every science and engineering discipline. Recently, a widely reported study conducted by the biotech firm "Amgen" revealed that of 53 previously published landmark papers, only six were reproducible. Recent studies have unearthed similar problems across a diverse set of Software Engineering domains, including, but not limited to, software traceability, feature location, and compiler optimization. Reproducibility is often undermined by lack of publicly available datasets, obsolete and unavailable tools, insufficient details about the experiment, and undocumented decisions about the way various metrics are computed. TraceLab provides a plug-and-play experimental environment, as well as libraries of shareable components and seminal experiments. As such, it is designed to address these problems.TraceLab introduces a radically different way of approaching empirical software engineering research and paves the way for greater community collaboration, more rigorous evaluation of results, and an easier entry-way for new researchers. It is expected to lay the foundation for future advances in the field of empirical software engineering, accelerate and shape future research directions, support industrial pilot studies, and significantly reduce the cost and effort that oftentimes discourages new researchers from entering the field. In addition, the project will provide opportunities to a diverse group of undergraduate and graduate students, and will be used for educational purposes across various software engineering courses.