There are numerous challenges, and rewards, in conducting empirical studies in industry. Challenges emanate from the multi-faceted complexity: in products, systems and services; development, evolution and management processes; vendor-customer models and relationships; organizational settings; business contexts and their dynamics; etc. Yet there are rewards for successful studies in terms of utility of the results for industry. This workshop builds on the results and momentum of previous CESI workshops held during ICSE (2013, ‘14, & ‘15).
A new element of CESI 2016 is that, beyond previous workshops’ focus on research methodology; we seek for research contributions highlighting how research results are put into action in industrial settings and how much cross company learning takes place through replication of empirical studies in different contexts. We are also interested in the impact of empirical studies conducted in industry, including successes and failures in the form of ‘lessons learned’. We believe that this move will: (i) further precipitate empirical research in the software engineering community, and (ii) engage industry participants from the point of view of the utility of results emanating from empirical studies. A long-term goal of the series of CESI workshops is to create a vibrant research and practice community with focus on conducting quality empirical studies in industry hoping that their results will help to improve software engineering.

Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:
impact and utility of study results in specific industrial contexts,
replication and families of studies in different industrial settings,
issues in sharing and publishing datasets and results,
validation of suggestive investigative questions;
communication between researchers and practitioners;
stakeholder involvement in studies;
establishing relationships;
dealing with threats coming from the study context;
interpreting results in industrial contexts;
generalizing the findings from case studies;
impact of industrial settings on the studies.

Paper categories

Experience reports (7 pages max) describe the experience with conducting studies in
industry over a period of time and lessons learned that would be useful to be added to the CESI body of knowledge.

Technical papers (7 pages max) are expected to focus on empirical studies conducted in industry, highlighting original aspects concerning the results of the studies and how they changed industrial practice. Also expected in these papers are comparisons of the advances made against the state-of-the-art.

Vision papers (4 pages max) are expected to describe new directions to follow in
conducting empirical studies in industry. Convincing arguments supported by clear rationale need to be included.

Practitioner messages (2 pages) are particularly intended for practitioners who are invited to submit their views on conducting empirical studies in industry.

Papers must describe original work not submitted or presented at other forums. Accepted papers will be published in electronic ICSE proceedings. The official publication date of the workshop proceedings is the date the ICSE proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. This date may be up to two weeks prior to the first day of ICSE 2016. The official publication date affects the deadline for any patent filings related to published work.

Keynote speaker and invited talks

Prof. Natalia Juristo (UPM) gives a keynote on “Experiences Conducting Experiments In

Industry: The ESEIL Fidipro Project”. Two invited talks, by Brendan Murphy (Microsoft Research), and Prof. Guilherme Horta Travassos (COPPE) are confirmed.

Submission information

Submissions are handled via Easychair (https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=cesi2016). They must be formatted according to (icse-
conferences.org/submission-guidelines).

Important dates

Submission of papers: February 5th, 2016
Notification: February 19, 2016
Camera-ready: February 26, 2016
Workshop: May 17, 2016