Action Research with Industrial Software Engineering: An Educational Perspective

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.