Guide to Advanced Empirical

224 A. Jedlitschka et al.
findings, by incorporating the limitations. All claims need to be supported by the results. For technologies not currently in use, scale-up issues should be discussed.
3.11. Conclusions and Future Work
The final section of the report should describe, based on the results and discussion, the following elements Summary, Impact, and Future Work.
The conclusion section begins with a concise summary of the research and its results as presented in the former sections. Unique to the domain of software engineering – in order to enable readers to get the most important findings with regard to the practical impact in one place – in the conclusion we emphasize a description, where possible, of the impact on cost, time, and quality, and a summary of the limitations. Note that these conclusions can only be drawn if they were directly investigated in the experiment.
Impact on Cost: What effort was necessary to introduce and perform the technique
(e.g., what are the costs of detecting a defect of a certain type with this technique Is there any impact on the cost of other steps of the development process, positive or negative ones (e.g., reduced cost for rework)?)
Impact on Time: Is there any positive or negative impact on the time of the proposed solution/technology/technique on other steps of the development process?
Impact on Quality: Is there any impact on the quality of the proposed solution technology/technique on the quality of other steps of the development process?
Besides the description of the impact, where possible and appropriate, a discussion of the approach’s level of maturity, when the investments will payback, and consequences arising from the implementation will help readers to assess the technology. (Although inmost cases artificial, we assume a rough estimate is better than no information.)
If applicable, limitations of the approach with regard to its practical implementation should also be described, i.e., circumstances under which the approach presumably will not yield the expected benefits or should not be employed. Furthermore, any risks or side-effects associated with the implementation or application of the approach should also be mentioned.
Finally, an outlook to future work should be given. It should describe what other research (i.e., experiments) could be carried out to further investigate the results yielded or evolve the body of knowledge and theoretical constructs.

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