Abstract
User studies are paramount for advancing research in software engineering, particularly when evaluating tools and techniques involving programmers. However, researchers face several barriers when performing them despite the existence of supporting tools. We base our study on a set of tools and researcher-reported barriers identified in prior work on user studies in software engineering. In this work, we study how existing tools and their features cope with previously identified barriers. Moreover, we propose new features for the barriers that lack support. We validated our proposal with 102 researchers, achieving statistically significant positive support for all but one feature. We study the current gap between tools and barriers, using features as the bridge. We show there is a significant lack of support for several barriers, as some have no single tool to support them. © 2025 The Authors