Jamie, >> The issue is one of practice. A strong case can be made for showing >> that undergraduates have had plenty of practice (usually a large percentage >> of their life) performing tasks related to those they are asked to perform >> in psychology studies (in some studies involving reasoning it has been >> argued that they are not representative of the general population). >> Undergraduates have not had anywhere near the amount of SE practice >> workers in industry have had (be it good or bad). Therefore it cannot be >> claimed that the results of SE studies using undergraduates will correlate >> with those performed using commercially experienced developers. > > I agree entirely with what you say here. However, in the >spirit of learning to crawl before they can walk, some >researchers have realized that, with much reservation, they must >start out by studying undergrads and postgrads before studying >professionals. As long as they discuss external validity >thoroughly and don't make any of the claims you rightly >criticize above, I think this is OK.
The problem is that (at least in the papers I have read) external validity gets scant mention (and I suspect they would have a difficult job proving it). There is also the problem of industry believing the results of studies that used students as subjects. Commercial software developers are well aware of the lack of skill of recent graduates (this is not a criticism of the graduates, just a statement of where they are on the learning curve). After all, they usually get to work with recent graduates with some degree of regularity. derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
