Background: Communicating software engineering research to industry practitioners and to other researchers can be challenging due to its context dependent nature. Design science is recognized as a pragmatic research paradigm, addressing this and other characteristics of applied and prescriptive research. Applying the design science lens to software engineering research may improve the communication of research contributions. Aim: The aim of this study is to 1) evaluate how well the design science lens helps frame software engineering research contributions, and 2) identify and characterize different types of design science contributions in the software engineering literature. Method: In previous research we developed a visual abstract template, summarizing the core constructs of the design science paradigm. In this study, we use this template in a review of a selected set of 38 top software engineering publications to extract and analyze their design science contributions. Results: We identified five clusters of papers, classified based on their alignment to the design science paradigm. Conclusions: The design science lens helps to pinpoint the theoretical contribution of a research output, which in turn is the core for assessing the practical relevance and novelty of the prescribed rule as well as the rigor of applied empirical methods in support of the rule.
In the area of Information Systems, several literature reviews were conducted of design science research. Indulska and Recker @cite_46 analyzed design science articles from 2005--07 from well-known Information Systems conferences. They identified 142 articles, which they divided into groups, such as methodology- and discussion-oriented papers and papers presenting implementations of the design science approach. They found an increasing number of design science papers over the studied years.
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The publication of the work on design science by Alan Hevner and his colleagues has fostered much discussion on what is and what is not considered to be design science in Information Systems (IS) research. Anecdotal evidence suggests that some authors claim design science as a methodology in their work, without much consideration of theoretical or methodological aspects, or the appropriateness of their artefact. Also it would appear that design science papers have been proliferating rapidly of late. Accordingly, we were interested to identify the proliferation, nature and quality of design science research in Information Systems conference publications since the publication of ’s work in 2004. We examine design science articles published at five major IS conferences over the last three years. We subject 83 articles, identified as relevant via a rigorous analysis process, to three types of analysis - statistical, thematic and methodological. The results of these analyses indicate that design science appears to be a growing stream of research in IS. We also found design science research to be strongly prevalent in the research domains of process, knowledge and information management. The most interesting results stem out of our methodological analysis, which suggests that only a small percentage of the papers discuss a concise and consistent implementation of the design science methodology suggested by