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Several researchers have criticized the standards of performing and reporting empirical studies in software engineering. In order to address this problem, Jedlitschka and Pfahl have produced reporting guidelines for controlled experiments in software engineering. They pointed out that their guidelines needed evaluation. We agree that guidelines need to be evaluated before they can be widely adopted.

The aim of this paper is to present the method we used to evaluate the guidelines and report the results of our evaluation exercise. We suggest our evaluation process may be of more general use if reporting guidelines for other types of empirical study are developed.

We used a reading method inspired by perspective-based and checklist-based reviews to perform a theoretical evaluation of the …