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This paper reports from a systems development research tradition, which emphasizes relating research activities to practice and establishing fruitful collaboration between groups of researchers and practitioners. The paper describes and evaluates a specific research project in which a large group of researchers and practitioners worked together to understand, support, and improve systems development practice over a period of three years. The case is used to reflect on the research goals, approaches, and results involved in this tradition for researching systems development practice. A combined approach—based on action research, experiments, and conventional practice studies—is suggested as one practical way to strike a useful balance between relevance and rigor in practice research. The paper concludes with a general discussion of the relation between research and practice as well as advice on how to design collaborative research efforts.

DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35505-4_9

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