Teaching and Learning Ethnography for Software Engineering Contexts
Yvonne Dittrich, Helen Sharp, Cleidson de Souza
TL;DR
The paper argues that ethnography provides a robust, practitioner-centered lens for understanding software engineering practices and for informing tool design, processes, and broader research programs. It offers a hands-on, exercise-driven teaching guide for faculty and a practical roadmap for students to plan, conduct, analyze, and report ethnographic studies in SE. Key contributions include detailed guidance on site selection, fieldwork, data analysis, and ethics, plus strategies to integrate ethnography with SE literature and other methods. The work emphasizes thick descriptions, iterative analysis, and the importance of the members’ point of view to produce actionable insights with real-world relevance.
Abstract
Ethnography has become one of the established methods for empirical research on software engineering. Although there is a wide variety of introductory books available, there has been no material targeting software engineering students particularly, until now. In this chapter we provide an introduction to teaching and learning ethnography for faculty teaching ethnography to software engineering graduate students and for the students themselves of such courses. The contents of the chapter focuses on what we think is the core basic knowledge for newbies to ethnography as a research method. We complement the text with proposals for exercises, tips for teaching, and pitfalls that we and our students have experienced. The chapter is designed to support part of a course on empirical software engineering and provides pointers and literature for further reading.