Why do research methods matter? What is the difference between research methods and methodologies? Why use qualitative methods when quantitative methods allow us to do powerful statistical analyses? What are the assumptions that we make in choosing research methods and methodologies to research a particular phenomenon? This talk will introduce some concepts that explain the differences in the research methods we use, and reasons for choosing quantitative or qualitative methods for data collection and analysis. The talk aims to be interactive, and encourage the student participants to think through a concrete example as well as details of their own doctoral research methodology.

Daniela Damian is a Professor of Software Engineering in University of Victoria’s Department of Computer Science, where she leads research in the Software Engineering Global interAction Laboratory (SEGAL, thesegalgroup.org). Her research interests include Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering and Global Software Development. Her recent work has studied developers’ socio-technical coordination in geographically distributed software projects, as well as stakeholder management in large software ecosystems. Daniela’s research methodologies involve extensive field work and in-situ studies of software teams through collaborations with industrial partners such as IBM, General Motors, Siemens and Dell. Daniela has served on the program committee boards or Program Co-Chair of several software engineering conferences, as well as on the editorial boards of Transactions on Software Engineering and the Journal of Requirements Engineering. She is serving on the Advisory Board at the Empirical Software Engineering Journal and as the Human Aspects Area Editor for the Journal of Software and Systems.