1. Using grounded theory to study the experience of software development Thijs Prins

2. Agenda Introduction Grounded Theory Data collection Analysis Literature search Questions

3. Introduction What is Grounded Theory? Qualitative research method Generates theory instead of testing it Hypotheses and theory appears out of the data

4. 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

5. Grounded Theory overview Data collection Analysis Open coding Selective coding Theoretical coding Literature search The Grounded Theory method (Adolph, Hall & Kruchten, 2011)

6. Data collection Qualitative method Semi-structured interview Participant observations

7. Open coding Line-by-line coding

8. Open coding(2) Discover incidents Generates concepts from incidents Concepts become categories

9. Open coding(3) What is memoing?

10. Selective coding Select a core category Best explains how participants deal with their concerns Centrally relevant to other categories Develop related categories

11. Theoretical coding A guess on how categories relate to each other Each relation is described as a hypothesis These hypotheses suggest a theory

12. Literature search Compare and contrast theory to existing literature

13. Questions?

14. 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: 10.1007/s10664-010- 9152-6