Some Recommendations on Experimenting

This chapter aims to outline the most important ideas discussed throughout the book, mainly focusing on some useful points for correctly running and documenting experiments so that they can be replicated by other people. Section 16.2 groups a series of precautions, which, although they have been addressed in other chapters of the book, should be taken into account by readers whenever they experiment. Section 16.3, on the other hand, provides a set of guidelines to aid novice experimenters to document their empirical work. These guidelines are designed to ease external replication. They can also be used to check that the fundamental design and analysis issues of each experiment have been taken into consideration.