Grounded theory in software engineering research: a critical review and guidelines

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Date
2016-05
Authors
Stol, Klaas-Jan
Ralph, Paul
Fitzgerald, Brian
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
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Abstract
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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Keywords
Grounded Theory , Software engineering research , Software engineering , Grounded theory
Citation
Stol, K.-J., Ralph, P. and Fitzgerald, B. (2016) 'Grounded theory in software engineering research: a critical review and guidelines', ICSE '16: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, 14-22 May, Austin, Texas, 2884833: ACM, pp. 120-131. doi: 10.1145/2884781.2884833
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© ACM, 2016. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in ICSE '16 Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 120-131, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884833