I’m happy to announce that our book chapter, A process for surviving survey design and sailing through survey deployment, contained within Perspectives on Data Science for Software Engineering (eds. Tim Menzies, Laurie Williams and Thomas Zimmermann), is now available in press. The book chapter is intended for software engineering researchers and practitioners who are interested in deploying surveys within their organization. As an author, an interesting aspect of the writing process for this book is that the materials were developed and peer-reviewed collaboratively on the GitHub ds4se repository. For example, here are the reviews for our own book chapter from the drafting process.

The abstract of the chapter follows:

In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his crew must confront Persephone’s Sirens, creatures that sang in irresistible voices and lured sailors to their deaths. Still, adventurers risked the journey for the promise of knowledge, for through the Sirens’ song, “[o]ver all the generous earth [the adventurers] know everything that happens.” With guidance from Circe, the goddess of magic, Odysseus instructed his crew to plug their ears to deafen them from the song. He then had his crew tie him to the mast and commanded them not to release him under any circumstances. And so Odysseus and his crew navigated safely past the Sirens. Odysseus, having heard the Sirens’ song, sailed away a wiser man. Surveys, as with Persephone’s Sirens, are an attractive instrument that offer a similar lure of knowledge. Like Circe, we offer guidance, grounded in our own experiences, on a successful process for understanding the practice of software engineering through surveys.