Design science methodology
Roel J. Wieringa · 2010
Design scientists have to balance the demands of methodological rigor that they share with purely curiosity-driven scientists, with the demands of practical utility that they share with utility-driven engineers. Balancing these conflicting demands can be conceptually complex and may lead to methodological mistakes. For example, treating a design question as an empirical research question may lead to researcher to omit the identification of the practical problem to solve, to omit the identification of stakeholder-motivated evaluation criteria, or to omit trade-off and sensitivity analysis. This tutorial aims to clear up this methodological mist in the case of software engineering (SE) research.