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...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: METRICS
• Authors: Siw Elisabeth Hove, Bente Anda
• Keywords: Interviews, METRICS 2005, Semi-structured Interviews, Software Engineering, Software Engineering