Supporting Meta-Description Activities in Experimental Software Engineering Environments Wladmir A. Chapetta, Paulo Sérgio M. dos Santos and Guilherme H. Travassos COPPE / UFRJ – Systems Engineering e Computer Science Department Caixa Postal 68.511, CEP 21945-970, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil {wladmir, pasemes, ght}@cos.ufrj.br Abstract. This paper describes our experience on building tools that support meta-descriptions activities in experimental software engineering environments. It aims at discuss how these tools have been used to help on the building of experimental software engineering environments. The experimental software engineering group at COPPE/UFRJ has been working with the development of an integrated environment to support experimentation in software engineering. This environment, called eSEE, is composed of three main software tools set regarding meta-descriptions activities (describing all the definitions and models to be used to configure meta experimentation environments), configuration and instantiation environments activities (concerned with the building of configured environments that can be used to instantiated specific experimentation environments) and workflow based activities (where tools to support the enactment of instantiated experimentation process can be found). Keywords. CASE, Experimental Software Engineering, expermentation process tools. 1. Introduction One of the Software Engineering goals is to provide ways to improve the development of software systems. To achieve it, methods and tools have been developed by the software engineers to support the software development and maintenance activities. Nevertheless, it is not found the application of investigative methods to understand what makes “software good” or how to make “software well” (PFLEEGER, 1999). To evaluate the Software Engineering approaches, represented by software processes, new product technologies and improvements, making them available to the industry, the scientific method can be applied. Experimental Software Engineering aims at the use of scientific methodology (experimentation) to define a better understanding about software development, costs and benefits of techniques, a body of knowledge consolidation and, thus, the definition of feasible models for software development (AMARAL & TRAVASSOS, 2003). Furthermore, the experimentation applied as a collaborative activity increases the credibility of the performed research (AMARAL 2003) and would allow knowledge and information sharing among researchers on the Software Engineering Community.