| name | fse-experiments |
| description | Use when designing or auditing ESEC/FSE empirical evaluations, covering real subject systems, fair baselines, SE-standard statistics and effect sizes, qualitative and mixed-methods rigor, contamination-aware LLM ablations, provenance for mining studies, and matching evidence to the shape of each software-engineering claim. |
FSE Experiments
Use this before submission when the empirical story is not yet locked. FSE reviewers are SE
empiricists; the evaluation is where a good idea is won or lost. The organizing principle is
evidence proportional to the claim — the study must test the thing the paper actually asserts,
on subjects and baselines a skeptic would accept.
Evaluation audit
- Match evidence to the claim shape. A claim about developer behavior needs behavior data; a
claim about detection needs a labeled ground truth; a claim about scalability needs runtime
on realistically sized inputs. Accuracy against a proxy label is not evidence for a practice
claim.
- Use real subject systems, sampled by a stated criterion, and list them in the artifact. Toy
benchmarks invite the "does this hold on real code?" reject.
- Choose fair baselines, including the strongest prior technique and a simple-but-reasonable
alternative, tuned with a documented, equal budget. An untuned baseline is a scored weakness.
- Report SE-standard statistics: effect sizes (not just p-values), confidence intervals,
appropriate tests, and corrections for multiple comparisons. Say what variance and how many runs.
- Hold qualitative work to method: coding schemes, inter-rater agreement, saturation, and an
audit trail — mixed-methods rigor is native to FSE, not a second-class option.
- Pin provenance for mining and LLM studies (see the code block) so the evaluation reproduces
rather than re-samples.
- Design threats in, not on: know before you run which confounds and generalization limits the
study will have, and instrument to bound them.
Claim-to-evidence design table
| SE claim | Matching evidence | Reject pattern avoided |
|---|
| "Technique detects more real defects" | Labeled real faults, precision/recall with CIs vs. tuned baseline | "Evaluated on injected/toy faults only" |
| "Developers act on the output" | Behavioral outcome data on real projects | "Plausibility rating stands in for usefulness" |
| "Scales to large systems" | Runtime/memory across realistic sizes | "Only small inputs tested" |
| "Finding generalizes" | Diverse subject sample + explicit external-validity limits | "One ecosystem, claimed universal" |
| "The model adds the value" | Ablation removing the model vs. lexical/heuristic features | "Model's marginal contribution never isolated" |
Contamination-aware LLM evaluation
When an LLM is in the loop, the reviewer's first questions are about leakage and reproducibility:
[Contamination] are test subjects plausibly in the model's training data? report cutoff vs.
project dates; prefer post-cutoff or held-out subjects
[Determinism] fix temperature/seed where possible; report the sampling settings
[Caching] store raw prompts and raw responses in the artifact; a live-API-only study
cannot be reproduced, only re-sampled
[Versioning] record exact model identifiers and access dates; models change under a name
[Ablation] isolate the model's marginal value against a non-LLM baseline
Provenance floor for mining studies
- Pin repository SHAs and record the corpus extraction date; archive the extracted dataset, not
just the query.
- State inclusion/exclusion criteria and the resulting sample size, with the filtering script in
the artifact.
- Report how duplicates, forks, and bot activity were handled — silent inclusion skews every
downstream number.
Vignette: evaluating a repair technique
Suppose the paper claims a program-repair technique fixes more real bugs than the prior tool. The
matching plan: draw bugs from a real, dated fault dataset; run both tools with an equal, documented
time budget; report plausible-and-correct patch counts with confidence intervals and an effect
size; manually assess a sample of patches for over-fitting; and state external validity (languages,
bug kinds) as a bounded threat — every number traceable to a logged run in the artifact.
Statistical reporting floor
- Effect sizes and confidence intervals for every quantitative comparison; say what the intervals
represent.
- Number of runs and the source of variance for any stochastic component.
- The compute actually consumed, not vague feasibility language.
Output format
[Evaluation readiness] strong / adequate / weak
[Claim -> evidence map] <claim: subjects/metric/statistic>
[Baseline fairness] <baseline -> tuned? equal budget? documented?>
[Contamination/provenance] <LLM leakage + mining provenance handled? yes/no>
[Threats-by-design] <confound/generalization -> instrumentation to bound it>
[Decision-critical next run] <one experiment or study extension>
