Software repositories contain many artefacts of qualitative nature, ranging from source code comments and commit messages to issue descriptions and documentation. To uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and projects, researchers often have to interpret these artefacts using qualitative data analysis methods, e.g., through qualitative coding. In this tutorial, we will introduce qualitative coding as an iterative process of individual and team activities and discuss how to conduct such qualitative data analysis in a rigorous way to increase the credibility of the results. We will cover different coding methods as well as the interactive design of a coding guide, and we will discuss how to ensure quality in qualitative data analysis, focusing on credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability. We will conclude the tutorial with a brief overview of common pitfalls in qualitative data collection.

Christoph Treude is an ARC DECRA Fellow and a Senior Lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Victoria, Canada, in 2012 and received his Diplom degree in Computer Science / Management Information Systems from the University of Siegen, Germany, in 2007. The goal of his research is to advance collaborative software engineering through empirical studies and the innovation of processes and tools that explicitly take the wide variety of artifacts available in a software repository into account.