Thematic Review and Analysis of Grounded Theory Application in Software Engineering
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We present metacodes , a new concept to guide grounded theory (GT) research in software engineering. Metacodes are high level codes that can help software engineering researchers guide the data coding process. Metacodes are constructed in the course of analyzing software engineering papers that use grounded theory as a research methodology. We performed a high level analysis to discover common themes in such papers and discovered that GT had been applied primarily in three software engineering disciplines: agile development processes, geographically distributed software development, and requirements engineering. For each category, we collected and analyzed all grounded theory codes and created, following a GT analysis process, what we call metacodes that can be used to drive further theory building. This paper surveys the use of grounded theory in software engineering and presents an overview of successes and challenges of applying this research methodology.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it