Applications of Causality and Causal Inference in Software Engineering

Causal inference is a study of causal relationships between events and the statistical study of inferring these relationships through interventions and other statistical techniques. Causal reasoning is any line of work toward determining causal relationships, including causal inference. This paper explores the relationship between causal reasoning and various fields of software engineering. This paper aims to uncover which software engineering fields are currently benefiting from the study of causal inference and causal reasoning, as well as which aspects of various problems are best addressed using this methodology. With this information, this paper also aims to find future subjects and fields that would benefit from this form of reasoning and to provide that information to future researchers. This paper follows a systematic literature review, including; the formulation of a search query, inclusion and exclusion criteria of the search results, clarifying questions answered by the found literature, and synthesizing the results from the literature review. Through close examination of the 45 found papers relevant to the research questions, it was revealed that the majority of causal reasoning as related to software engineering is related to testing through root cause localization. Furthermore, most causal reasoning is done informally through an exploratory process of forming a Causality Graph as opposed to strict statistical analysis or introduction of interventions. Finally, causal reasoning is also used as a justification for many tools intended to make the software more human-readable by providing additional causal information to logging processes or modeling languages

Evaluating the Impact of Experimental Assumptions in Automated Fault Localization

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How software engineering research aligns with design science: A review

Background: Assessing and communicating software engineering research can be challenging. Design science is recognized as an appropriate research paradigm for applied research but is seldom referred to in software engineering. Applying the design science lens to software engineering research may improve the assessment and communication of research contributions. Aim: The aim of this study is 1) to understand whether the design science lens helps summarize and assess software engineering research contributions, and 2) to characterize different types of design science contributions in the software engineering literature. Method: In previous research, we developed a visual abstract template, summarizing the core constructs of the design science paradigm. In this study, we use this template in a review of a set of 38 top software engineering publications to extract and analyze their design science contributions. Results: We identified five clusters of papers, classifying them according to their alignment with the design science paradigm. Conclusions: The design science lens helps emphasize the theoretical contribution of research output---in terms of technological rules---and reflect on the practical relevance, novelty, and rigor of the rules proposed by the research.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figure