Example case study research in software engineering

An approach to presenting your own research is to identify an existing academic/scholarly article that reports in some way that you find informative and that might steer your analysis of your own case study or development/maintenance management system.
The following 'convenience sample' of articles ranges over diverse perspectives but offer (in my opinion) useful and informative case studies researching empirical software engineering.

A field study of the software design process for large systems
B Curtis, H Krasner, N Iscoe - Communications of the ACM, 1988 - dl.acm.org

Ethnographically-informed systems design for air traffic control
R Bentley, JA Hughes, D Randall, T Rodden… - Proceedings of the …, 1992 - dl.acm.org

ISO9000 and the very small firm
EM Wareham - IEE Review, 1994 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

Conversational Conventions and Participation in Cross-Functional Design Teams
E Wynn, D G Novick - Proceedings of COOCS, 1995 - ACM

Flight of the Eagle: The Birthing and Life of a Super-Minicomputer.
J Faughnan, S Stevanovic - Project Management, 1996 - faughnan.com

Embracing change with extreme programming
K Beck - Computer, 1999 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

A case study of open source software development: the Apache server
A Mockus, RT Fielding… - Software Engineering, …, 2000 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

Working artefacts: ethnomethods of the prototype
L Suchman, R Trigg, J Blomberg - The British journal of …, 2002 - Wiley Online Library

Reflective Design Practices in Human Computer Interaction and Software EngineeringELC Law - Proceedings of the Workshop on Designing for …, 2004 - Citeseer

When software engineers met research scientists: A case studyJ Segal - Empirical Software Engineering, 2005 - Springer

Sociomaterial practices: Exploring technology at work
WJ Orlikowski - Organization studies, 2007 - oss.sagepub.com

Scrum in a multiproject environment: An ethnographically-inspired case study on the adoption challenges
A Marchenko, P Abrahamsson - Agile, 2008. AGILE'08. …, 2008 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

Collaboration and co-ordination in mature eXtreme programming teams
H Sharp, H Robinson - International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 2008 - Elsevier

The influence of organizational structure on software quality: an empirical case study
N Nagappan, B Murphy, V Basili - … conference on Software engineering, 2008 - dl.acm.org

Successful knowledge transfer within offshore supplier networks: a case study exploring social capital in strategic alliances. 

Rottman, J. (2008), Journal of Information Technology, 23, 31–43.

Distributed Communication as Collective Socio-material Sensemaking in Global Software WorkS Vidolov, S Kelly - 2009 - aisel.aisnet.org

Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering
P Runeson, M Höst - Empirical Software Engineering, 2009 - Springer

Understanding project survival in an ES environment: a sociomaterial practice perspective
EL Wagner, S Newell, G Piccoli - Journal of the Association for Information …, 2010 - Citeseer

Scrum+ engineering practices: Experiences of three microsoft teams
L Williams, G Brown, A Meltzer… - … Software Engineering …, 2011 - ieeexplore.ieee.org

Sociomaterial bricolage: The creation of location-spanning work practices by global softwaredevelopers
A Johri - Information and Software Technology, 2011 - Elsevier

Entanglements of creative agency and digital technology: a sociomaterial study of computer game development
NS Panourgias, J Nandhakumar… - … Forecasting and Social …, 2013 - Elsevier

The validity of case study research is often called into question by asserting that the findings from single cases cannot and should not be generalised beyond the specific contexts and events of the case's empirical setting. However, the criticism ignores our human ability to generalise and glean learning ourselves when we hear stories of others' experiences. You could call it vicarious learning, looking over someone's shoulder, it exemplifies our innate ability to juxtapose and translate learning from one context and apply it to a different context. Furthermore human activity systems, of which software engineering is but one example, are intrinsically 'in vivo' settings. They are open and transparent to  sociological enquiry insofar as its actors participate reflexively within a wider social world. The reflexivity of human actors is present in so far as we, as protagonists, are aware of and take account of ourselves in terms of our behaviour, actions, and agency.

I adopting a stance that human activity systems diverge from the usual notions of functional science and therefore argue for the value of learning gained from cases. Rather than extrapolating from the specific to the general, cases encourage us to reflect on and relate learning from the specifics of cases to other contexts or situations.

---

Footnote: The field you address will relate to the findings you arrive at from your analysis of the data you gather, which of course is influenced by the access you have to an empirical case study site.

empirical case + access levels -> data gathered -> analysis -> findings -> audience / field

The field or conference you publish in will have its own format template that is simply adapted for the write-up.