Tutorial 4
Theory & Practice on Grounded Theory: Conducting Qualitative Research in Software Engineering
 Cleidson de Souza (IBM Brasil) |
 Rafael Prikladnicki (PUCRS) |
 Tayana Conte (UFAM) |
Friday, October 1, 2010 (08:30-12:30) |
Grounded Theory (GT) is a research methodology that uses an inductive technique based on systematic and incremental analysis of qualitative data. It is widely used in other areas including social (e.g., sociology, anthropology) and medical sciences (e.g., nursing, medicine). Recently, it is possible to notice an increase on the adoption of qualitative methods in Software Engineering (SE) research. The adoption of qualitative methods is very important since they allow a broad comprehension of the phenomena being studied. This comprehension is required to the development of effective technologies to software engineering practice. This means that it is more and more important to learn a qualitative analysis methodology, like GT, in the context of Software Engineering research. As the use of GT increases, many researchers started to use the method in distorted or even wrong ways. Thus, in this tutorial, we present both the theoretical and practical aspects of Grounded Theory (GT) to be applied as a technique for conducting qualitative research in Software Engineering. This tutorial will present the history of the method, its concepts and main aspects, as well as practical examples applied to software engineering. At the end of the tutorial, the participants will be able to: understand and analyze the feasibility of the use of qualitative research methods, especially Grounded Theory, and be able to apply this method properly. Authors:
- Cleidson de Souza is a Research Scientist at IBM Brazil working with Service Science. Before that, he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at Federal University of Par�. Cleidson holds a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science from this same department, a M. S. degree also in Computer Science from the State University of Campinas, and a M.S. and a Ph.D. degrees in Information and Computer Sciences from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the UC, Irvine. His research interests are in the field of computer-supported cooperative work as applied to software engineering. More specifically, collaborative and human software engineering, distributed software engineering, and empirical software engineering.
- Rafael Prikladnicki is Assistant Professor of Computer Science School at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS), Brazil. He is also a consultant and trainer on distributed software development, project management, software quality and agile methodologies for software development (focusing on Lean Thinking and Scrum). He is currently involved in projects related to distributed and global software development, agile methodologies, and software quality. He is one of the coordinators of the research group on distributed software development (MuNDDoS??) at PUCRS, coordinator of the SPIN network from SEI located in Porto Alegre (SPIN-POA) and coordinator of Agile Users Group in Porto Alegre, Brazil. He is also the general chair of the Agile Brazil Conference 2010.
- Tayana Conte is a Researcher and Full Professor at the Federal University of Amazonas, Brazil. Tayana Conte received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She is consultant of the MPS.BR - Brazilian Reference Model for Software Quality as well as a member of the Model Technical Team (ETM). Her main research area is software engineering and her research interests include empirical software engineering, web usability, web engineering, and software quality.
