Advice on Getting a Start into Research

by Tao Xie 
Tao Xie's Advice Portal: Also read Tao Xie's Advice on Writing Research Papers, Tools and Tips for Writing Papers, and Advice Collections, and Introductory Readings of Sofware Testing Research.

There are many ways of proceeding, depending on how much you have already read and done. Here are some general suggestions.

Guidelines on finding a research topic:

  1. If you don't have specific ideas of your interests (but you are interested in pursuing research in software engineering), talk to me and I will give you an overview of different directions in software engineering/testing and the directions that I am most interested in. I will give you freedom on choosing the directions that interest you most for pursuit (in other words, I won't pick a direction or problem for you). Here is a list of research directions in software engineering (but it is a bit out of dated).
  2. If you already have some idea of your interests (or even don't have an idea of a specific research direction but have some idea of your big research direction/topic),  

After you have already decided your research topic (after discussing with me), you can do the following along the way of pursuing that topic:

    Other readings: