On whose shoulders we stand: theory building versus theory testing in requirements engineering research - Sjaak Brinkkemper

Prof.dr. Sjaak Brinkkemper is full professor of Software Production at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He leads a group of about twenty-five researchers specialized in product software development and entrepreneurship. The main research themes of the group are methodology of software production, implementation and adoption, and techno-economic aspects of the software industry. Brinkkemper has published about 10 books and over 170 papers.

Abstract:

This interactive presentation will discuss what kind of research approach is feasible in different research project contexts in the RE domain. Typical issues are: What is the main research question? What is the underlying theoretical framework? How should the hypothesis be formulated? What is the best way to conduct an experiment? All students of the DS will be send an existing paper from the REFSQ community and are requested to have it read before the DS, so we can reflect upon the research method in this paper. Thereafter, we will have a plenary discussion to reflect on the choices the students have made in their own PhD work.