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METRICS
2005
IEEE

Experiences from Conducting Semi-structured Interviews in Empirical Software Engineering Research

14 years 4 months ago
Experiences from Conducting Semi-structured Interviews in Empirical Software Engineering Research
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 qualityofthecollecteddataisrelatedtohowtheinterviews 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 experiencesfrom12softwareengineeringstudies,inwhich 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 usingtheappropriatetoolsandprojectartifacts.Thepaper gives advice on how to handle these areas and suggests what information about the int...
Siw Elisabeth Hove, Bente Anda
Added 25 Jun 2010
Updated 25 Jun 2010
Type Conference
Year 2005
Where METRICS
Authors Siw Elisabeth Hove, Bente Anda
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