DocumentCode :
2024896
Title :
Experiences from conducting semi-structured interviews in empirical software engineering research
Author :
Hove, Siw Elisabeth ; Anda, Bente
Author_Institution :
Simula Res. Lab., Lysaker
fYear :
2005
fDate :
1-1 Sept. 2005
Lastpage :
23
Abstract :
Many phenomena related to software development are qualitative in nature. Relevant measures of such phenomena are often collected using semi-structured interviews. Such interviews involve high costs, and the quality of the collected data is related to how the interviews are conducted. Careful planning and conducting of the interviews are therefore necessary, and experiences from interview studies in software engineering should consequently be collected and analyzed to provide advice to other researchers. We have brought together experiences from 12 software engineering studies, in which a total of 280 interviews were conducted. Four areas were particularly challenging when planning and conducting these interviews; estimating the necessary effort, ensuring that the interviewer had the needed skills, ensuring good interaction between interviewer and interviewees, and using the appropriate tools and project artifacts. The paper gives advice on how to handle these areas and suggests what information about the interviews should be included when reporting studies where interviews have been used in data collection. Knowledge from other disciplines is included. By sharing experience, knowledge about the accomplishments of software engineering interviews is increased and hence, measures of high quality can be achieved
Keywords :
software engineering; data collection; semistructured interviews; software engineering; Costs; Humans; Inspection; Laboratories; Programming; Project management; Sociology; Software engineering; Software measurement; Software testing;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Software Metrics, 2005. 11th IEEE International Symposium
Conference_Location :
Como
ISSN :
1530-1435
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2371-4
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/METRICS.2005.24
Filename :
1509301
Link To Document :
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