Guidelines on Conducting Software Process Improvement Studies in Industry
Erik Arisholm, Bente Anda, Magne Jørgensen, Dag I. K. Sjøberg · 1999
Initiating and conducting empirical case studies in industry are non-trivial tasks. There are many pitfalls, and many researchers have failed in their research. For example, there is the risk that the results are not particularly useful for the IT organization. As a result, the IT organization will be reluctant to cooperate with the researchers again. The purpose of this paper is to share the authors' experience and lessons learnt in conducting empirical case studies within software process improvement in cooperation with industry. In particular, we focus on the potential conflicts between the organizational goals and the research goals. Our experiences are summarized in terms of guidelines that we believe are useful for researchers in this area.