Requirements Specifications and Recovered Architectures as Grounded Theories
Daniel M. Berry, Michael W. Godfrey, Ric Holt, Cory J. Kapser, Isabel Maria Pinto Ramos · Portuguese National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology (RCAAP Project by FCT) · 2008
Abstract. This paper describes grounded analysis (GA) as a method to discover grounded theories (GTs) be subjected to later empirical validation. The paper shows that a good instance of Requirements Engineering (RE) or Architecture Recovery (AR) is an instance of GA for the purpose of discovering the artifacts that RE or AR produces. Therefore, these artifacts are also GTs. 1 Grounded Theory Grounded analysis (GA) [1] is a method for developing grounded theories (GTs) [2], each of which consists of a collection of hypotheses, about a human process. In the 1960s, discomfort was growing with the application of traditional statistical methods to understanding and explaining social phenomena. GA was developed in response to this discomfort to provide a means gather detailed empirical evidence for theory that could be later subjected to traditional statistical empirical validation using controlled experiments or other means. GA is an adaptive research process for finding emergent theory that could not be anticipated in advance of the research. The researcher adapts the research process based on what he 3 has learned from the data he has seen so far