Most research articles are written for other researchers, leaving “popularization” to further publications (that for the most part never happen).
What if you were able to capture and present your research work in such a way that it furthers your research and speaks to practitioners as well? After all, without application in practice, there will be no believable evaluation of your work.
Enter our article on the handbook method, in which we show how to use the time-worn practice of writing patterns (handbooks of best practices) to present scientific theories (in the domain of software engineering for us).
The idea is simple: Write down your research results in a form that can be understood and used by practitioners and use this as the starting point for evaluation and validation of your theory.
During theory building, for the sake of scientific communication, using free-form scientific publications may be enough, but this fails during theory evaluation. The proof of the pudding is when actual practitioners use your method and for this, they first need to understand it. Research papers don’t do the job.
Using the handbook method, researchers break down their theory into (proposed) best practices, structure them in workflows, and assign them to domains. Not every topic may be a good fit for this structure, but many are.
I believe that the handbook method is a good way (and certainly an improvement over the state of the art) of capturing and presenting software engineering theories with the goal of making them accessible to practitioners. We are currently evaluating this claim, stay tuned.
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