Teaching and Learning Ethnography for Software Engineering Contexts

TL;DR

This paper introduces ethnography as a research method tailored for software engineering students, offering teaching strategies, exercises, and insights to facilitate learning and application in empirical research contexts.

Contribution

It provides the first targeted educational material on ethnography for software engineering students, including teaching tips, exercises, and common pitfalls.

Findings

Provides foundational ethnography knowledge for beginners

Includes practical exercises and teaching tips

Highlights common challenges in ethnography teaching

Abstract

Ethnography has become one of the established methods for empirical research on software engineering. Although there is a wide variety of introductory books available, there has been no material targeting software engineering students particularly, until now. In this chapter we provide an introduction to teaching and learning ethnography for faculty teaching ethnography to software engineering graduate students and for the students themselves of such courses. The contents of the chapter focuses on what we think is the core basic knowledge for newbies to ethnography as a research method. We complement the text with proposals for exercises, tips for teaching, and pitfalls that we and our students have experienced. The chapter is designed to support part of a course on empirical software engineering and provides pointers and literature for further reading.