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Teaching Action Research

Miroslaw Staron

TL;DR

The chapter argues that software engineering faces a crisis of limited empirical results and poor transfer to practice. It presents action research as a collaborative, cyclic methodology that embeds researchers within host organizations to plan, intervene, and evaluate changes, generating knowledge across process, organizational, tooling, and artefact dimensions. Key contributions include a clear articulation of the pillars (host embedding, interventions, and action teams), a five-phase cycle, governance roles (action team, reference group, management), and comprehensive guidance on ethics and pedagogy. The work highlights practical implications for industry-academia collaboration and offers teaching guidelines and concrete examples to facilitate adoption and effective teaching of action research in software engineering.

Abstract

Action research entered into software engineering as one of the responses to the software engineering research crisis at the end of the last millennium. As one of the challenges in the crisis was the lack of empirical results and the transfer of research results into practices, action research could address these challenges. It is a methodology where collaboration and host organizations are the focus of knowledge discovery, development, and documentation. Although the method is often well received in industrial contexts, it isn't easy to learn as it requires experience and varies from organization to organization. This chapter describes the pillars of action research as a methodology and how to teach them. The chapter includes examples of teaching action research at the bachelor, master, and PhD levels. In addition to theory, the chapter contains examples from practice.

Teaching Action Research

TL;DR

The chapter argues that software engineering faces a crisis of limited empirical results and poor transfer to practice. It presents action research as a collaborative, cyclic methodology that embeds researchers within host organizations to plan, intervene, and evaluate changes, generating knowledge across process, organizational, tooling, and artefact dimensions. Key contributions include a clear articulation of the pillars (host embedding, interventions, and action teams), a five-phase cycle, governance roles (action team, reference group, management), and comprehensive guidance on ethics and pedagogy. The work highlights practical implications for industry-academia collaboration and offers teaching guidelines and concrete examples to facilitate adoption and effective teaching of action research in software engineering.

Abstract

Action research entered into software engineering as one of the responses to the software engineering research crisis at the end of the last millennium. As one of the challenges in the crisis was the lack of empirical results and the transfer of research results into practices, action research could address these challenges. It is a methodology where collaboration and host organizations are the focus of knowledge discovery, development, and documentation. Although the method is often well received in industrial contexts, it isn't easy to learn as it requires experience and varies from organization to organization. This chapter describes the pillars of action research as a methodology and how to teach them. The chapter includes examples of teaching action research at the bachelor, master, and PhD levels. In addition to theory, the chapter contains examples from practice.
Paper Structure (10 sections, 3 figures)

This paper contains 10 sections, 3 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Pillars of Action Research
  3. Knowledge produced during action research
  4. Phases of Action Research
  5. The research team == the action team
  6. Host organization
  7. Interventions
  8. Ethics of Action Research
  9. Guidelines for teaching action research
  10. Summary and conclusions

Figures (3)

  • Figure 1: Pillars of action research -- embedding in the host organization, conducting actions/interventions and collaborative, cross-organization action teams.
  • Figure 2: Phases of action research
  • Figure 3: Action team in the context of other teams. The action team is the one conducting the research. The reference team is the team who helps in evaluating and scaling-up the work of the action team. The management team holds the responsibility for the financing, staffing and monitoring the action research study.