Action Research in Software Engineering: Metrics' Research Perspective (Invited Talk)

Software engineering is an applied discipline of science. Its focus on software development processes, technologies and organizations makes it broad and exciting to work with. However, it makes it also challenging to find the right research method to get the results that have impact on industrial practices and that help software organizations to provide more value to their customers. In this paper, I argue that the traditional empirical software engineering methods must be complemented with action research. In the paper, I provide an overview of the methodology of action research, briefly explain the phases and present my experiences from over a decade long applications of action research in industrial contexts. I focus on how action research helps to provide the most value to the collaborating companies, how it helps to build more robust software engineering theories and how it helps individual researchers to develop their careers. I conclude with a short description of how action research can evolve in the future.