A Conceptual Model of Software Engineering Research Approaches

A key motivation for undertaking software engineering research is a need to improve industrial software engineering practice. In order to address this need, it is necessary to adopt an approach to research that responds to industry problems and facilitates the orderly evaluation, adoption and continuous improvement of research outputs. This paper proposes a simple conceptual model which can be used to describe, discuss and compare a broad range of research approaches. The model is validated by using it to unify prior contributions in the area of software engineering research approaches and presenting a case study.