Journal
2016 IEEE/ACM 38TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (ICSE)
Volume -, Issue -, Pages 120-131Publisher
IEEE
DOI: 10.1145/2884781.2884833
Keywords
Grounded theory; software engineering; review; guidelines
Funding
- Science Foundation Ireland [13/RC/2094]
- Irish Research Council New Foundations Scheme
- Enterprise Ireland grant [IR/2013/0021]
- Royal Irish Academy under the Charlemont Award Programme
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Grounded Theory (GT) has proved an extremely useful research approach in several fields including medical sociology, nursing, education and management theory. However, GT is a complex method based on an inductive paradigm that is fundamentally different from the traditional hypothetico-deductive research model. As there are at least three variants of GT, some ostensibly GT research suffers from method slurring, where researchers adopt an arbitrary subset of GT practices that are not recognizable as GT. In this paper, we describe the variants of GT and identify the core set of GT practices. We then analyze the use of grounded theory in software engineering. We carefully and systematically selected 98 articles that mention GT, of which 52 explicitly claim to use GT, with the other 46 using GT techniques only. Only 16 articles provide detailed accounts of their research procedures. We offer guidelines to improve the quality of both conducting and reporting GT studies. The latter is an important extension since current GT guidelines in software engineering do not cover the reporting process, despite good reporting being necessary for evaluating a study and informing subsequent research.
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