The Empirical Software Engineering Group (ESEG) is a group of researchers concerned with empirical studies in software engineering, organizing and publishing a body of knowledge in order to aid and support institutions and professionals in their decision-making regarding the evaluation of technologies in software engineering.

ESEG is a multi-institutional group formed by PhDs and Masters researchers from the Informatics Center of Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), Federal University of Paraiba (UFPB), University of Pernambuco (UPE), Federal Institute of Pernambuco (IFPE), and Federal Institute of Alagoas (IFAL).

Our main areas of research involve:

• Software engineering professionals may be interested in the Evidence Briefings we have been creating, since they present the main findings of rigorous scientific research based on systematic literature reviews in order to better support decision-making by practitioners.

• Actually, we use Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) and Systematic Mapping Studies (SMS), since they are the most widely recognized tools to conduct empirical studies in software engineering. The SLRs are used to investigate some specific area of knowledge through a well-defined research question, identifying, understanding, and interpreting all available research, in order to organize the knowledge and draw non-trivial conclusions that were not possible before, when researchers did not have the wide view provided by the SLR. The SMSs, on other hand, are typically employed to generate a broad view of a research area, hence, SMSs are naturally a phase that usually precedes a SLR (or even some other types of studies) when the researchers do not have strong knowledge of the area to formulate very specific and well defined research questions.

• Once SLRs and SMSs are experimental-oriented methods they must be conducted in a rigorous manner to bring forth conclusive and reliable results. Therefore, both methods are narrowly described in guidelines, step-by-step with all necessary sections, in order to be reproducible and auditable.