Experience Reports

Goal

Scope

Experience reports should be described and organized such that they are useful for study and insight and such that the key ideas and results can be reused by practitioners.

Important Dates

Quality Criteria for Papers

Structure and content of report

The structure and content of a good experience report is characterized as follows.

• The introduction
• presents the background and the context of the contribution
• makes clear which roles the authors of the contribution play in the work that is being reported
• summarizes results and insight in a few sentences
• gives an overview of the structure of the paper
• The main sections
• of a "classic" experience report describe the approach and its results in terms of the methods, techniques, languages, tools, processes, prerequisites, problems, and people involved, as appropriate
• of a case study describe a product and give rationale for the key decisions shaping the product
• The conclusion
• evaluates the results and derives experience and insight that is valuable for the intended audience of the paper
• reports both positive and negative observations (nothing is perfect!)
• discusses limitations and the range of applicability
• refers to related experience by others and discusses it (if such experience exists and if this has not been discussed in the introduction)
• summarizes the state of work and sketches future work (if applicable)
• The references
• list all publications that have been referenced in the paper
• are complete and consistent in style

Frequently, authors of experience reports fail to present background, motivation, and evaluation of results; describing only the practical application of a method, process or language. Such a "how we did it" report has no value for most readers because they can't derive any insight or directions for their own work from it. Avoid this FMM (frequently made mistake).

Experience reports should provide lessons that can be drawn from what you did. However, reporting only positive experience is another FMM. An experience report is no sales brochure, so include all interesting observations, whether positive, negative or inconclusive.

Ideally, results are evaluated quantitatively. If you do not have quantitative results, give at least a qualitative discussion of results. For example, if you report on the application of process xxx, tell the audience what different stakeholders in the process think about the success/failure of xxx and what they expected, give your (the authors') observations and insights and compare them with those of the stakeholders, etc.

Review Process

How to Submit

Submission is closed as of October 4, 2002.

If you are having problems submitting a paper electronically over the Internet, please see the If You Have Submission Problems page.

Submitted (and accepted) papers must conform to the ICSE 2003 paper format and should not exceed six pages, including all text, references, appendices, and figures.

For case studies, it can be a problem to provide enough depth and detail within a limit of six pages. In this case, include the context, an overview, some typical examples and the evaluation in your paper. Assemble all the details into a technical report and make it available on the Web. Provide a reference and the URL of this technical report in your paper.

We'll expect submissions to be in Adobe Portable Document (PDF) Format; however, if submitting in PDF presents a hardship for you, contact the chairpersons.

Acceptance Notification

All accepted contributions will be published in the conference proceedings. Papers must conform to the ICSE proceedings publication format. There will be a page limit of six pages per paper.