We present metacodes, a new concept to guide grounded theory (GT) research in software engineering. Metacodes are high level\r\ncodes that can help software engineering researchers guide the data coding process. Metacodes are constructed in the course of\r\nanalyzing software engineering papers that use grounded theory as a research methodology. We performed a high level analysis\r\nto discover common themes in such papers and discovered that GT had been applied primarily in three software engineering\r\ndisciplines: agile development processes, geographically distributed software development, and requirements engineering. For each\r\ncategory, we collected and analyzed all grounded theory codes and created, following a GT analysis process, what we call metacodes\r\nthat can be used to drive further theory building. This paper surveys the use of grounded theory in software engineering and\r\npresents an overview of successes and challenges of applying this research methodology
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