Using grounded theory to study the experience of software development Thijs Prins
Agenda Introduction Grounded Theory Data collection Analysis Literature search Questions
Introduction What is Grounded Theory? Qualitative research method Generates theory instead of testing it Hypotheses and theory appears out of the data
Introduction(2) Who are the authors? University of British Columbia, Vancouver Electrical and Computer Engineering School of Nursing Steve Adolph, Wendy Hall, and Philippe Kruchten Why software development? enhance efficiency in software development teams lack of examples describing the use of Grounded Theory
Grounded Theory overview Data collection Analysis Open coding Selective coding Theoretical coding Literature search The Grounded Theory method (Adolph, Hall & Kruchten, 2011)
Data collection Qualitative method Semi-structured interview Participant observations
Open coding Line-by-line coding
Open coding(2) Discover incidents Generates concepts from incidents Concepts become categories
Open coding(3) What is memoing?
Selective coding Select a core category Best explains how participants deal with their concerns Centrally relevant to other categories Develop related categories
Theoretical coding A guess on how categories relate to each other Each relation is described as a hypothesis These hypotheses suggest a theory
Literature search Compare and contrast theory to existing literature
Questions?
References Adolph, S., Hall, W., Kruchten, P. (2011). Using grounded theory to study the experience of software development. In C. Seaman, J. Sillito, R. Prikladnicki, T. Dybå & K. Rönkkö (Eds.) Empirical Software Engineering (2011). Springer Science. DOI: /s