Case Study Research in Software Engineering: Guidelines and Examples

CHAPTER 8

USING CASE STUDY RESEARCH

8.1 INTRODUCTION

Case studies have started to gain attraction and acceptance within software engineering. Even purely qualitative studies are accepted, and the community is learning to distinguish between “toy” cases and real-life case studies. Case studies are starting to get used for different purposes.

In this chapter, we address different areas of use for case study research and also touch upon future development of case study research. Section 8.2 addresses how to read and review case study research reports, and which quality criteria should apply for the conduct and reporting of case studies to allow their publication. In Section 8.3, the needs for, and methods for synthesizing evidence from several case studies are elaborated. The economics of case studies, that is, the return on investment in case study research, is discussed in Section 8.4. The issue of specialization of case study research for software engineering is elaborated in Section 8.5. Finally, the use of case studies as drivers in software process improvement is discussed in Section 8.6.

8.2 READING AND REVIEWING CASE STUDIES

Case study reports may be read for at least three purposes: (i) to review a manuscript and judge whether a case study report should be published or not, (ii) to learn from a published case study report for use in further research, or (iii) to learn from a case study for use in practice.

Reviewing empirical research in general must be done with certain ...