Nudging Developers to Participate in SE Research

Software engineering (SE) research seeks to create, investigate, and improve tools and processes for developing and maintaining software applications. To conduct such research, it is valuable for researchers to find and recruit participants representative of their target audience to complete experiments. However, participants in most SE user studies are not professional software engineers—but Computer Science students, anonymous users, or no humans. This work aims to improve the recruitment of developers to participate in research experiments by proposing a novel online system, SE Participants, that nudges software engineers to participate in studies by acknowledging their efforts and contributions to SE research.