ABSTRACT
Software engineering research has been fairly late to recognize the value of qualitative studies. Carolyn Seaman was one of the first strong advocates of qualitative studies (Seaman 1999). She suggested that the advantage of qualitative approaches is that “they force the researcher to delve into the complexity of the problem rather than abstract away from it”. She also pointed out that, in the context of software engineering, “the blend of technical and human behavioural aspects lends itself to combining qualitative and quantitative methods, in order to take advantage of the strengths of both”.
