The limits of ethnography: combining social sciences for CSCW
CSCW '94 Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Towards an integrated organization and technology development
Proceedings of the 1st conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, & techniques
Symmetry of igorance, social creativity, and meta-design
C&C '99 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Creativity & cognition
The geography of coordination: dealing with distance in R&D work
GROUP '99 Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work
Proceedings of the 22nd international conference on Software engineering
Investigating information systems with action research
Communications of the AIS
Participatory It Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities
Participatory It Design: Designing for Business and Workplace Realities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination
FOSE '07 2007 Future of Software Engineering
Fieldwork for Design: Theory and Practice (Computer Supported Cooperative Work)
Fieldwork for Design: Theory and Practice (Computer Supported Cooperative Work)
Coordination Practices in Distributed Software Development of Small Enterprises
ICGSE '07 Proceedings of the International Conference on Global Software Engineering
Cooperative method development
Empirical Software Engineering
The secret life of bugs: Going past the errors and omissions in software repositories
ICSE '09 Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering
Challenges of applying ethnography to study software practices
Proceedings of the ACM-IEEE international symposium on Empirical software engineering and measurement
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Context: Studying work practices in the context of Global Software Development (GSD) projects entails multiple opportunities and challenges for the researchers. Understanding and tackling these challenges requires a careful and rigor application of research methods. Objective: We want to contribute to the understanding of the challenges of studying GSD by reflecting on several obstacles we had to deal with when conducting ethnographically-informed research on offshoring in German small to medium-sized enterprises. Method: The material for this paper is based on reflections and field notes from two research projects: an exploratory ethnographic field study, and a study that was framed as a Business Ethnography. For the analysis, we took a Grounded Theory-oriented coding and analysis approach in order to identify issues and challenges documented in our research notes. Results: We introduce the concept of Business Ethnography and discuss our experiences of adapting and implementing this action research concept for our study. We identify and discuss three primary issues: understanding complex global work practices from a local perspective, adapting to changing interests of the participants, and dealing with micro-political frictions between the cooperating sites. Conclusions: We identify common interests between the researchers and the companies as a challenge and chance for studies on offshoring. Building on our experiences from the field, we argue for an active conceptualization of struggles and conflicts in the field as well as for extending the role of the ethnographer to that of a learning mediator.