If you look at research papers in software engineering, you will notice a significant thing has happened in the last several years. With the rise of, first the

If you look at research papers in software engineering, you will notice a significant thing has happened in the last several years. With the rise of, first the WWW, and then open-source repositories, there is now a large body of code available that was simply absent before. It is now usual/common for research to investigate, test, experiment against that. This must be a positive change, that we should be hopeful about yielding more substantial results.