  Background: Retrieving and mining practitioners' self--reports of their
professional experience of software practice could provide valuable evidence
for research. We are, however, unaware of any existing reviews of research
conducted in this area. Objective: To review and classify previous research,
and to identify insights into the challenges research confronts when retrieving
and mining practitioners' self-reports of their experience of software
practice. Method: We conduct an exploratory review to identify and classify 42
articles. We analyse a selection of those articles for insights on challenges
to mining professional experience. Results: We identify only one directly
relevant article. Even then this article concerns the software professional's
emotional experiences rather than the professional's reporting of behaviour and
events occurring during software practice. We discuss challenges concerning:
the prevalence of professional experience; definitions, models and theories;
the sparseness of data; units of discourse analysis; annotator agreement;
evaluation of the performance of algorithms; and the lack of replications.
Conclusion: No directly relevant prior research appears to have been conducted
in this area. We discuss the value of reporting negative results in secondary
studies. There are a range of research opportunities but also considerable
challenges. We formulate a set of guiding questions for further research in
this area.

Software Engineering