Grounded Theory Applied: Studying Information Systems Development Methodologies in Practice

This article reports how we used grounded theory to study whether and how system developers use Information Systems Development methodologies in practice. The work is founded on a case study carried out in a large software company. The data collection was based on semi-structured qualitative interviews with staff and it was supplemented by literature and documents studies. As our intention was to study how practice behaves instead of investigating if practice behaves in a specific way we had to use an open research method. With the collected data we therefore performed an analysis based on the grounded theory methodology. Grounded theory describes a general way to search relevant topics and relations through three sequential steps, but gives little concrete advice of how to actually perform a grounded theory analysis. We here provide such a detailed description of our approach, and discuss its advantages as well as its potential problems.