Research
- Find and report new knowledge
- Use existing knowledge to generate new concepts, methodologies, and understandings
Goal: Avoid focusing on unexisting or irrelevant problems.
- Gap in SOTA
- Open problems
- Gap in practice
Method: Choose the right one!
Findings: Validation is extremely important!
Paper publishing
Solution-seeking VS Knowledge-seeking
Solution-seeking
- Solve practical problems for which solution can be engineered.
- Researchers design, create, or develop solutions for a software engineering challenge
- Outcome: algorithms, models, and tools.
Design science method: 3 phases
- Understand of the problem
- Develop/Build
- Justify/Evaluate
ITERATIVELY (3 or more iterations)
Knowledge-seeking
- Aim to learn something about a specific topic
- Can be conducted to evaluate or validate
Knowledge is in documents, papers or unpublished works
Case Study
Knowledge is in people - using case study
- Method for studying a phenomenon in its natural context, especially when the phenomenon is difficult to study in isolation
- Weakness: impossible to generalize
Research Methods
In solution-seeking: difficult to validate the artifact/solution
In knowledge-seeking: how to evaluate the quality of the acquired knowledge