Eseur: Empirical Software Engineering Data for Evidence-Based Analysis

This repository contains the empirical data and source code used to generate examples for the book "Evidence-based Software Engineering based on the publicly available data" by Derek Jones. Updated in February 2026, the collection aggregates diverse datasets spanning software evolution, developer psychology, and economic modeling. It serves as a foundational resource for reproducing statistical analyses in empirical software engineering.

Use Cases

• Statistical analysis of system evolution using the provided source-code-analysis data
• Modeling developer career paths based on cognitive-science and psychology-experiment logs
• Economic modeling of software ecosystems using the included economic-models data

Strengths

• Aggregates data across 14 distinct tags including cognitive science and economic models
• Expert-curated specifically for a published textbook on evidence-based engineering
• Provides the necessary code to reproduce statistical analyses

Limitations

• Lack of a unified schema across the various files in the collection
• Unknown record counts and file sizes for individual sub-datasets
• Requires the companion textbook for full context on data collection parameters

Provenance

Source

Derek Jones, author of 'Evidence-based Software Engineering based on the publicly available data'

Collection Method

Aggregated from various publicly available sources and primary psychology experiments

Freshness

Last updated February 11, 2026.