Case Studies for Software Engineers

A full day tutorial presented at
ICSE 2004, May 24, 2004, Edinburgh
ICSE 2006, May 21, 2006, Shanghai
Presenters: Susan Elliot Sim, Dewayne E. Perry, Steve M. Easterbrook, Jorge Aranda

The Tutorial

• The slides presented at the tutorial
• The questionnaire we used as an exercise for evaluating published case studies
• A brief exercise on the nature of theories

Example Case Studies

Note: these should not necessarily be taken as exemplary studies. This list includes both good and bad examples of case study research. The question of which ones are which is left as an exercise for the reader.

• Victor R. Basili, Richard W. Selby, and Tsai-Yun Phillips, “Metric Analysis and Data Validation Across Fortran Projects,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 652-663, 1983.
• Mark G. Bradac, Dewayne E. Perry, and Lawrence G. Votta, “Prototyping a process monitoring experiment,” presented at Fifteenth International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 155-165, 17-21 May 1993.
• D.N. Card, V.E. Church, and W.W. Agresti, “An Empirical Study of Software Design Practices,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 12, no. 2, pp. 264-271, 1986.
• William G. Griswold, Jimmy J. Yuan, and Yoshikiyo Kato, “Exploiting the Map Metaphor in a Tool for Software Evolution,” presented at Twenty-third International Conference on Software Engineering, Toronto, Canada, pp. 265-274, 12-19 May 2001.
• Sallie M. Henry and Dennis G. Kafura, “Software Structure Metric Based on Information Flow,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 7, no. 5, pp. 545-522, September, 1981.
• Oliver Laitenberger, Thomas Beil, and Thilo Schwinn, “An Industrial Case Study to Examine a Non-Traditional Inspection Implementation for Requirements Specifications,” Empirical Software Engineering: An International Journal, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 345-374, 2002.
• Dewayne E. Perry, Harvey P. Siy, and Lawrence G. Votta, “Parallel Changes in Large Scale Software Development: An Observational Case Study,” presented at Twentieth International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 251-260, 19-25 April 1998.
• Carolyn B. Seaman and Victor R. Basili, “An Empirical Study of Communication in Code Inspections,” presented at Nineteenth International Conference on Software Engineering, Boston, MA, pp. 96-106, 17-23 May 1997.
• Susan Elliott Sim and Richard C. Holt, “The Ramp-Up Problem in Software Projects: A Case Study of How Software Immigrants Naturalize,” presented at Twentieth International Conference on Software Engineering, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 361-370, 19-25 April, 1998.
• David M. Weiss and Victor R. Basili, “Evaluating Software Development by Analysis of Changes: Some Data from the Software Engineering Laboratory,” IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 11, no. 2, pp. 157-168, 1985.
• Matthias M. Müller and Walter F. Tichy, “Case Study: Extreme Programming in a University Environment,” presented at Twenty-third International Conference on Software Engineering, Toronto, Canada, pp. 537-544, 12-19 May 2001.

Books

• Robert K. Yin, Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002.
• Stake, R.E. The art of case study research. Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage. 1995
• Ragin, C.C., & Becker, H.S. (Eds.). What is a case? Exploring the foundations of social inquiry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 1992
• Barbara Kitchenham, Lesley Pickard, and Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, “Case Studies for Method and Tool Evaluation,” IEEE Software, pp. 52-62, July, 1995.
• William J. Ray, Methods Toward a Science of Behavior and Experience, Fourth Edition. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, 1993.
• Flyvbjerg, B.; Five Misunderstandings about Case Study Research. Qualitative Inquiry 12 (2) 219-245, April 2006.