A Pilot Case Study on Innovative Behaviour: Lessons Learned and Directions for Future Work

摘要

Context: A case study is a powerful research strategy for investigatingcomplex social-technical and managerial phenomena in real life settings.However, when the phenomenon has not been fully discovered or understood, pilotcase studies are important to refine the research problem, the researchvariables, and the case study design before launching a full-scaleinvestigation. The role of pilot case studies has not been fully addressed inempirical software engineering research literature. Objective: To explore theuse of pilot case studies in the design of full-scale case studies, and toreport the main lessons learned from an industrial pilot study. Method: Wedesigned and conducted an exploratory case study to identify new relevantresearch variables that influence the innovative behaviour of softwareengineers in the industrial setting and to refine the full-scale case studydesign for the next phase of our research. Results: The use of a pilot casestudy identified several important research variables that were missing in theinitial framework. The pilot study also supported a more sophisticated casestudy design, which was used to guide a full-scale study. Conclusions: When aresearch topic has not been fully discovered or understood, it is difficult tocreate a case study design that covers the relevant research variables andtheir potential relationships. Conducting a full-scale case study using anuntested case design can lead to waste of resources and time if the design hasto be reworked during the study. In these situations, the use of pilot casestudies can significantly improve the case study design.