Complete thesis - Murdoch University

on contextual issues) that he suggests are occurring as a result of the SE industry adoptingthe industry-as-laboratory approach, in which researchers identify problems through closeinvolvement with industrial projects and create and evaluate solutions in an almost indivisibleresearch activity. This approach emphasises what people actually do or can do in practice,rather than what is possible in principle. The subfield of EBSE (Evidence-based SE) takesas its goalto provide the means by which current best evidence from research can be integratedwith practical experience and human values in the decision making processregarding the development and maintenance of software.(Kitchenham et al, 2004)In summary it can be argued that CS, IS and SE research overlap, with some aspects of eachstudied within the research paradigms adopted by a specific discipline. A greater affinityexists between IS and SE research, in that there is an alignment in the philosophical stance.This stance also aligns with that of the educational researcher, so the assumption, that cognitionand understanding is not a thing located within the individual thinker but is a processthat is distributed across the knower, the environment in which knowing occurs, and theactivity in which the learner participates, is fundamental to how research is conducted. Thusresearch paradigms which simply examine these processes as isolated variables within laboratoryor other impoverished contexts of participation will necessarily lead to an incompleteunderstanding of their relevance in more naturalistic settings.For the both the learning scientist and the IT researcher, however, simply observing phenomenaas they naturally occur in the world may not be adequate, given a frequently explicittransformative agenda: the act of research almost inevitably influences the research domain.Although grounded in differing philosophical stances, both Design Research and Action Researchhave been proposed as means of meeting this need for contextual research for action.4.1.1 Design ResearchHistorically, design experiments have been the province of design sciences (science of theartificial (Simon, 1981)), including aeronautics, architecture, engineering and medicine. Designdisciplines have a long history of building their knowledge base through making theconstruction of artefacts and the evaluation of artefact performance following construction.Design experiments entail both ‘engineering’ particular forms of design process as prototypesand systematically studying those within the context defined by the means of supportingthem.185