Using a Visual Abstract as a Lens for Communicating and Promoting Design Science Research in Software Engineering

Empirical software engineering research aims to generate prescriptive knowledge that can help software engineers improve their work and overcome their challenges, but deriving these insights from real-world problems can be challenging. In this paper, we promote design science as an effective way to produce and communicate prescriptive knowledge. We propose using a visual abstract template to communicate design science contributions and highlight the main problem/solution constructs of this area of research, as well as to present the validity aspects of design knowledge. Our conceptualization of design science is derived from existing literature and we illustrate its use by applying the visual abstract to an example use case. This is work in progress and further evaluation by practitioners and researchers will be forthcoming.