Case Study Research in Software Engineering: Guidelines and Examples

CHAPTER 9

INTRODUCTION TO CASE STUDY EXAMPLES

9.1 INTRODUCTION

Chapters 10–14 report the experiences of the authors in the design, conduct, and reporting of a range of case studies. The experiences are presented as narratives, structured according to the main stages of a case study presented in Section 2.6, linking these experiences to the guidelines and advice reported in Part I of this book. The narratives provide detailed real examples of the design, conduct, and reporting of case studies. These examples are intended to complement the abstracted guidelines reported in previous chapters. As such these experiences represent a state-of-practice and are not intended as a benchmark for best practice.

There are mistakes and weaknesses in the design, conduct, and reporting of these case studies and the motivation for reporting these limitations is to encourage others to improve their case studies rather than to reinforce a repetition of these limitations. Also, these experiences are obviously described from a particular perspective and it is likely that other participants in the case studies, researchers or practitioners, would have alternative experiences that would complement and perhaps on occasions contradict the experiences reported here.

The case study examples are selected to illustrate some varying types of studies. The study characteristics are summarized in Table 9.1. The Scale characteristic is relative so that, for example, the XP and RMT cases are smaller in scale but ...