Grounded Theory Applied - Studying Information Systems Development Methodologies in Practice

  • Authors:

  • Bo Hansen Hansen;Karlheinz Kautz

  • Affiliations:

  • Copenhagen Business School, Denmark;Copenhagen Business School, Denmark

  • Venue:
  • HICSS '05 Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Volume 08
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

This article reports how we used grounded theory to study whether and how system developers use Information Systems Development methodologies in practice. The work is founded on a case study carried out in a large software company. The data collection was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with staff and it was supplemented by literature and documents studies. As our intention was to study how practice behaves instead of investigating if practice behaves in a specific way we had to use an open research method. With the collected data we therefore performed an analysis based on the grounded theory methodology. Grounded theory describes a general way to search relevant topics and relations through three sequential steps, but gives little concrete advice of how to actually perform a grounded theory analysis. We here provide such a detailed description of our approach, and discuss its advantages as well as its potential problems.