Abstract
Software practitioners and managers seeking to improve the quality of their software development processes often adopt new technologies without sufficient evidence that they will be effective, while other technologies are ignored despite the evidence that they most probably will be useful. As a consequence, software is often built with techniques for which we have insufficient evidence to confirm their suitability, qualities, costs, and inherent risks. This leads to a variety of problems ranging from financial losses to personal injuries. Evidence-based Software Engineering (EBSE) addresses this issue by using reliable evidence from empirical studies, practical experience, and human judgement to support decision making in the development and maintenance of software. The talk will basically consist of two parts. Part one will give a general introduction to and motivation for EBSE with reference to similar work within the medical domain. In doing this, examples will also be taken from newly published and ongoing research on software design methods and pair programming with Java as the implementation language. The second part of the talk will focus how practitioners can use the evidence-based paradigm as part of their daily work to improve their software process.