Software engineering is a field rich with exciting empirical research opportunities. Today we produce large repositories of software development and usage data that can be applied to the study of descriptive and prescriptive models of software engineering processes and products with a goal of building higher quality and more effective software systems. Thus, this text is a timely contribution to the software engineering literature.

Each of the 11 chapters covers an important area of knowledge for an empirical researcher, from software models and metrics to experimental design, to statistical analysis. Beyond standard texts in this area, I can highlight the chapters on “Mining Data from Software Repositories” (chapter 5) and “Mining Unstructured Data” (chapter 10) as providing some of the latest thinking and techniques in empirical research directions.

While I can recommend the currency and rich content of this text, the presentation is disappointing. The flow among the chapters seems arbitrary, resulting in more of a reference book than a coherent textbook for a class curriculum. Also, each of the chapters progresses from topic-to-topic, list-to-list, equation-to-equation, and table-to-table with little connective tissue that tells a bigger story. The result is a choppy read that instructs but does little to illuminate the potential of empirical research in software engineering.