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. 1. Introduction Grounded theory (GT) is a systematic qualitative research methodology, originating in the social sciences and emphasizing the generation of theory from qualitative data in the process of conducting research. Grounded theory, in its original form, was proposed by Glaser and Strauss [1]. However, it was not until 1993 that we could find the first significant grounded theory work applied in software engineering (SE) [2]. Since that date, more researchers have adopted the process and GT has shown promising results. There is a limited, but increasing, body of literature reporting the application of grounded theory in SE. Nevertheless, GT applications in software engineering are still very limited, most likely due to the complexities of applying GT methodology in SE. The GT methodology, we argue, requires adaptation for successful employment in the software engineering domain. The contribution of this paper is to provide what we will call metacodes that can be used to drive the initial coding phase of GT. The paper also provides an analysis of existing GT applications in software engineering and the characteristics of such application as exhibited in the existing literature. This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a brief history of grounded theory and its application in the software engineering arena. Section 3 presents the methodology we adopted to survey, categorize, and analyze GT coding. The subsequent three sections present a literature review and the metacodes thematically organized by the application area. We look at three areas: agile development, distributed
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