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Thematic review and analysis of grounded theory application in software engineering

Published: 01 January 2013 Publication History

Abstract

We present metacodes, a new concept to guide grounded theory (GT) research in software engineering. Metacodes are high level codes that can help software engineering researchers guide the data coding process. Metacodes are constructed in the course of analyzing software engineering papers that use grounded theory as a research methodology. We performed a high level analysis to discover common themes in such papers and discovered that GT had been applied primarily in three software engineering disciplines: agile development processes, geographically distributed software development, and requirements engineering. For each category, we collected and analyzed all grounded theory codes and created, following a GT analysis process, what we call metacodes that can be used to drive further theory building. This paper surveys the use of grounded theory in software engineering and presents an overview of successes and challenges of applying this research methodology.

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  • (2018)Some reasons why actual cross-fertilization in cross-functional agile teams is difficultProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3195836.3195839(97-103)Online publication date: 27-May-2018

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Published In

cover image Advances in Software Engineering
Advances in Software Engineering  Volume 2013, Issue
January 2013
71 pages
ISSN:1687-8655
EISSN:1687-8663
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Hindawi Limited

London, United Kingdom

Publication History

Accepted: 04 September 2013
Received: 05 June 2013
Published: 01 January 2013

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View all
  • (2018)How many story points for diversity?Proceedings of the 4th Conference on Gender & IT10.1145/3196839.3196872(221-223)Online publication date: 14-May-2018
  • (2018)Some reasons why actual cross-fertilization in cross-functional agile teams is difficultProceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering10.1145/3195836.3195839(97-103)Online publication date: 27-May-2018

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