Statistical Power and the First meeting with co-supervisor 

It was a rainy day, so I decided not to go to the office early in the morning. I remember that today I have a meeting with Prof John Grundy at 2.30pm, so it would be just nice to come to the office after the zuhur prayer and have lunch there. The whole morning I sat down spend time on reading this article “A systematic review of statistical power in software engineering experiments” by Tora Dyba et. al (2005). The result of the study is really surprising to me as a new researcher. It shows that statistical power of SE experiments falls substantially below the acceptable level. Statistical power here refers to the probability that a statistical test will correctly reject the null hypothesis (Cohen, 1988). According to Dyba et al. (2006), “A test without sufficient statistical power will not be able to provide the researcher with enough information to draw conclusions regarding the acceptance or rejection of the null hypothesis”.
Therefore, I was thinking that all SE researchers in the world should look into this matter seriously or at least to have a standard convention of statistical power on SE empirical research. One of the implication highlighted in the review was that the importance of the statistical power is seems to be underemphasized in experimental SE research. InsyaAllah, this will be one of the major aspects in the coming experiment next year. I am indeed grateful to have study this review at early stage before I come up with the design of the experiments.
Oh..sorry dear the original story is accidentally deviated.. hehe..Too much excited about statistics. Back to the meeting with John, hmm…John is a very nice Professor, humble and talkative..ehehe I even have to interrupt him whenever necessary ..hahaha.. He suggested having a meeting together with Emilia when she comes back from OZ. And, not only that, he also invited me to attend the supervision meeting with his other postgrad students which is conducted on every Monday. Huuhu… boleh tak klu tak pegi?? Isk..isk… malaih nye aku nak present report kat group tuh..I know their research stuffs are related to visualization and tools, none is empirical stuffs. Huh mcmne nak jawab nih….
He asked me to email him about my decision whether to join or not. He seems very much interested in the Pair Programming and other Agile stuffs. Lega jgk la aku dia suka proposal tu and the hypothesis I proposed. Alhamdulillah.. I also told him that I was doing the SR now, specifically on the review protocol development. He has a lot of brilliant ideas, and he look forward that I will be developing certain tools besides the experiments. Of course I do interested in tools development since my interest lies very much on programming. But then, my limitation is that, to put the priority on the design and running of the experiments which should have proper planning and strategy. I never do any of this before what more to conduct an empirical research, but yeah “there is always the first time for everything!”. May Allah makes this ride easy for me till the day of the viva exam. Ameen.