Determine who will be the right candidate for your case study. Get permission, quotes, and other features that will make your case study effective. Get in touch with your candidate to see if they approve of being part of your work. Study that candidate’s situation and note down what caused it May 08, · When to do a case study. A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case. Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation. They keep your Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins Choose the Right Topic for a Case Study: In order to succeed in case study writing, remember that it has a very important influence on the dissertation, so try to select the topic which would be really captive and fascinating, as every dissertation paper is supposed to be thought provoking and bring something new into the discipline. The case researched for the dissertation, should Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins
Tips on Writing a Case Study for a Dissertation | Case Study Template
Most good empirical software engineering papers that contain a study follow the same structure for its presentation. As far as I know, this structure was not invented by a single researcher, but developed gradually over the course of many publications.
Professional readers how to do a dissertation case study your case study to follow this structure, how to do a dissertation case study, too. The audience that really matters for your publication—your thesis supervisor, his PhD advisor or program committee members—all are professional readers. The goal of this article is to describe this structure: the basic building blocks of thesis chapters or paper sections that make up case study presentations.
It is meant as an introduction and thus necessarily skips details. For further reading, this article contains links at the end. As a reader, I expect each section to answer a specific set of questions. In the following, I describe the gist of each section, its set of questions and common mistakes. To make the sections more tangible, I use part of a study from one of our papers.
The study investigates inconsistencies in code clones. This section states the questions that the study aims to answer and their rationale. It should contain:. A frequent mistake is missing rationale. In such papers, the motivation behind the research question often remains unclear or unconvincing. Some background on the example paper: code clones are duplicated pieces of source code in a software systems.
They hinder software maintenance, since changes must often be made to all clone instances. If a clone gets forgotten during such a change, the code becomes inconsistent. This inconsistency can be a bug. What I wanted to investigate with my study, was how big of a problem this is in practice. One the one hand, I had seen some instances of inconsistent clones that suspiciously looked like bugs.
On the other hand, I had no idea how frequently this occurred, and if this really was problematic in practice. My study goal was to quantify this by analyzing clones and their inconsistencies in real systems. The rationale of the first research question was to understand if inconsistent changes to clones happen at all, and how often. If they are very rare, they probably do not deserve further investigation which is performed by the later research questions in the paper, how to do a dissertation case study.
This section outlines the study objects e. software systemswhich the study analyzes to answer its research questions. Why and maybe how those objects were chosen. This is relevant, since choice can influence study result validity. For the example, a large number of study objects and ideally their random selection from a large pool of potential study objectswould increase the generalizability of the study results. I thus had to rely on our industry contacts to get hold of these developers.
This limited my choices and thus potentially affects generalizability of the results which is mentioned in the threats to validity section. A frequent mistake is to not mention why those objects were chosen and what the consequences of the choice are. As a reader, this makes me wonder if the selection was manipulated to better produce the answers the author was looking for. If a study involves data from industry, the study object names are often anonymized e.
For the authors, however, it makes it much easier to get clearance to publish these results. This section describes how the study, using the information from the study objects, attempts to answer the research questions.
For the clone study, I computed the percentage of inconsistent clones among all clones. For this, I defined two sets:. IC : Set of inconsistent clonesi. clone groups with substantial differences between clones, how to do a dissertation case study, such as missing statements.
Intuitively, it denotes the probability that a clone group in the system contains at least one inconsistency. This section describes the nitty gritty details required to implement how to do a dissertation case study study design in reality.
In principle, how to do a dissertation case study, they could also be included directly in the description of the study design. However, it is easier for the reader to first understand the general idea, and then the details.
For the clone study, this section states detection parameters like minimal clone length and number of allowed differences between clones. It also treats handling of false positives, generated code and overlapping clone groups. This section describes the results and interprets them with respect to the research questions.
Since there is often a lot of data, this section should guide the reader through the results. In studies with large amounts of data, it is often easier to read to separate description of the data from its interpretation. In the example, the paper presents the results for each study object and then the aggregated ratio. The paper thus answers the question positively: yes, clones are changed inconsistently. A common mistake is to mix the results with the discussion.
This makes it harder for the reader to separate backed-up results from speculation. Interpretation of the results that go further than the research questions. This can, e. The clone paper based on the above presented and further questions concludes, that clones are a threat to program correctness, implying that their proper management deserves more attention.
This section lists all threats, i. reasons why the study results could be wrong. Ideally, it then treats every single threat and describes what you did to make sure that this threat does not invalidate your study results. Internal threats are reasons why the results could be invalid for your study objects. In the example, the parameter values of the clone detector have a strong impact on the detected clones. The section states that we mitigated the threat through a pre-study we performed in order to validate the chosen parameter values.
To be honest, this is a weak mitigation. What it really says is that we tinkered with the values until they felt good and then did the study. A stronger mitigation would be to also perform the study how to do a dissertation case study different parameter values and investigate whether the general results still hold. Since this distracts from the main study, such back-up studies are often how to do a dissertation case study described in a much abbreviated fashion in the threats section itself.
External threats are reasons why the results encountered for the study objects might not be transferable to other objects. In the example, the way we chose the study objects through our personal network might bias our results. To mitigate this threat, we at least chose systems that had different characteristics, such as programming language, development contractor and age.
The most common mistake is to ignore threats entirely. Much better but still improvable is to state a threat without giving a mitigation or an estimation of its severity.
The case study structure described in this article can be used in two different decomposition styles. The most common one is described in this article. It orders by section first and by research question second:. Is most frequent alternative, however, is to order by research question first and by section second:. Both decomposition styles have advantages and drawbacks. I use these heuristics to select the decomposition level:. This is the case in the clone paper example. Research questions two and three ask whether the inconsistencies between clones are unintentional, and if so, whether they represent a fault.
RQ n thus builds upon the results of RQ n Since the study sections share so much, describing them in isolation would create a lot of redundancy, how to do a dissertation case study. They are thus easier to read all at once. Decomposition by study section facilitates this. In this paper we wrotethe study objects, design and procedure of research questions one and three have nothing in common. Since there is little synergy between them, it is easier to read a complete study—from question to results interpretation—before reading the next one.
For them, simply choose the decomposition style that feels right, but stick to it for the entire study description. From my experience, you only really get to feel if a style feels right, once you write it down, often two times, once in each decomposition style. This is tedious, but pays off, since a suitable decomposition style strongly increases the readability of your study.
Thanks to Rainer Koschke and Stefan Wagner for literature suggestions and to Daniela Steidl for reading drafts of this. Informatiker, Software-Analyst, Sprecher, Wein- und Biertrinker. View all posts by ElmarJuergens. You are commenting using your WordPress. com account. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account, how to do a dissertation case study. Notify me of new comments via email.
Notify me of new posts via email.
Dissertation Case Study Analysis Recordedmpeg4
, time: 7:32How to Do a Case Study | Examples and Methods
Choose the Right Topic for a Case Study: In order to succeed in case study writing, remember that it has a very important influence on the dissertation, so try to select the topic which would be really captive and fascinating, as every dissertation paper is supposed to be thought provoking and bring something new into the discipline. The case researched for the dissertation, should Estimated Reading Time: 3 mins Determine who will be the right candidate for your case study. Get permission, quotes, and other features that will make your case study effective. Get in touch with your candidate to see if they approve of being part of your work. Study that candidate’s situation and note down what caused it May 08, · When to do a case study. A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case. Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation. They keep your Estimated Reading Time: 5 mins
No comments:
Post a Comment