Action Research Use in Software Engineering: an Initial Survey

This paper presents a literature survey of action research (AR) studies published in nine major Software Engineering (SE) journals and three conference proceedings in the period 1993 to June 2009. A strict selection based on distinguishing SE from Information Systems research has identified 16 papers. Although they represent a very small fraction of the studies being conducted in SE, such papers concern with different SE contexts allowing to get information about the increasing tendency in the AR use in software engineering. However, as shown by the initial results, SE researchers should invest more on rigor when defining, applying and reporting AR studies in SE.