ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses qualitative methods for synthesizing research studies. In most cases, qualitative synthesis methods are used when the individual primary studies used qualitative research methods, or used a variety of different experimental methods. In the context of software engineering, industrial case studies are a particularly important form of primary study because they provide more realistic information about the extent to which new methods and tools scale-up to the complexity of industrial scale software development than laboratory experiments. As discussed in Chapter 18 and Chapter 19, case studies often adopt qualitative methods. They, therefore, require qualitative approaches, such as the ones described in this chapter, to synthesise their results.
