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Action Research with Industrial Software Engineering -- An Educational Perspective

Yvonne Dittrich, Johan Bolmsten, Catherine Seidelin

TL;DR

Action research in industrial software engineering addresses how to teach and perform AR in real organizations while delivering usable methods and tools. The authors present CMD as a structured, participatory framework and illustrate it with SIM, WMU, and IU, and they augment theory with practical toolkits, visualisations, and workshop designs. The work identifies mechanisms for anchoring AR in organizations, conducting ethnographic problem understanding, deliberating interventions, and pursuing sustainable change, backed by concrete case-driven guidance. The findings offer educators and researchers a practice-oriented model to enable responsible, impactful action research that can evolve software practices in industry.

Abstract

Action research provides the opportunity to explore the usefulness and usability of software engineering methods in industrial settings, and makes it possible to develop methods, tools and techniques with software engineering practitioners. However, as the research moves beyond the observational approach, it requires a different kind of interaction with the software development organisation. This makes action research a challenging endeavour, and it makes it difficult to teach action research through a course that goes beyond explaining the principles. This chapter is intended to support learning and teaching action research, by providing a rich set of examples, and identifying tools that we found helpful in our action research projects. The core of this chapter focusses on our interaction with the participating developers and domain experts, and the organisational setting. This chapter is structured around a set of challenges that reoccurred in the action research projects in which the authors participated. Each section is accompanied by a toolkit that presents related techniques and tools. The exercises are designed to explore the topics, and practise using the tools and techniques presented. We hope the material in this chapter encourages researchers who are new to action research to further explore this promising opportunity.

Action Research with Industrial Software Engineering -- An Educational Perspective

TL;DR

Action research in industrial software engineering addresses how to teach and perform AR in real organizations while delivering usable methods and tools. The authors present CMD as a structured, participatory framework and illustrate it with SIM, WMU, and IU, and they augment theory with practical toolkits, visualisations, and workshop designs. The work identifies mechanisms for anchoring AR in organizations, conducting ethnographic problem understanding, deliberating interventions, and pursuing sustainable change, backed by concrete case-driven guidance. The findings offer educators and researchers a practice-oriented model to enable responsible, impactful action research that can evolve software practices in industry.

Abstract

Action research provides the opportunity to explore the usefulness and usability of software engineering methods in industrial settings, and makes it possible to develop methods, tools and techniques with software engineering practitioners. However, as the research moves beyond the observational approach, it requires a different kind of interaction with the software development organisation. This makes action research a challenging endeavour, and it makes it difficult to teach action research through a course that goes beyond explaining the principles. This chapter is intended to support learning and teaching action research, by providing a rich set of examples, and identifying tools that we found helpful in our action research projects. The core of this chapter focusses on our interaction with the participating developers and domain experts, and the organisational setting. This chapter is structured around a set of challenges that reoccurred in the action research projects in which the authors participated. Each section is accompanied by a toolkit that presents related techniques and tools. The exercises are designed to explore the topics, and practise using the tools and techniques presented. We hope the material in this chapter encourages researchers who are new to action research to further explore this promising opportunity.
Paper Structure (11 sections, 1 figure, 1 table)

This paper contains 11 sections, 1 figure, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Action Research in the Software Industry
  3. Anchoring the action research project in the organisation
  4. Understanding the problem before implementing changes
  5. Responsibility and Interventions
  6. Deliberation – Anchoring Interventions and Improvements in the Organisation
  7. Visualisations - supporting mutual understanding and materialising complexity and change
  8. Challenges as learning opportunities
  9. Interventions as a stepping stone for creating sustainable change
  10. From Action to the Research Results
  11. Conclusion

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: Illustration of the Cooperative Method Development approach to action research The numbers indicate the 3 phases of the CMD cycle Eriksson2008.