Making Software

What Are Qualitative Methods?

Put simply, qualitative methods entail the systematic gathering and interpretation of nonnumerical data (including words, pictures, etc.). Like quantitative methods, qualitative methods can be used to gather data to confirm or reject beliefs (deductive reasoning). However, qualitative methods can also be used to support inductive reasoning: gather data to arrive at new explanations. Because qualitative methods gather nonnumerical data, they also lend themselves to being used in more natural settings.

To illustrate, let’s focus on a specific scenario and discuss how qualitative methods might be used to understand it. Imagine you’ve just started managing a software team. You’re leading a new project and have just adopted a new bug tracking system with some great features your team has been dying to have. Over the next few months, you see your team patching a lot of code and making great progress, but every time you check the bug list in the new system, there are only a few reports from the same few testers and they never seem to change. Then, one morning you walk by your best developer’s desk and see the old bug tracker up on his screen. Your team has been secretly using the old system for weeks! After all of that training, the careful transition, and the costly licensing, why aren’t they using the new tracker?

One obvious thing to do is simply ask. For example, you could call a meeting and just ask the team to explain why they’re avoiding the new system. ...