Experience of industry case studies: a comparison of multi-case and embedded case study methods

This research comprises a methodological comparison of two independent empirical case studies in industry: Case Study A and Case Study B. Case Study A, is a multiple-case study involving a set of short-duration data collections with 46 practitioners at 9 international companies engaged in offshoring and outsourcing. Case Study B, in contrast, is a single case, participant observation embedded case study lasting 13 months in a mid-sized Irish software company with geographically distributed software teams. Both cases were exploring similar problems of understanding the activities performed by various actors involved in scrum software development teams. In this study, we examine the findings from both studies, the efficiency of the different case study methods and the contributions offered by each approach. We adopted naturalistic research criteria to evaluate the two case study approaches. We found that both multiple-case and embedded case studies are suitable for exploratory research (hypothesis development) but that embedded research may also be more suitable for explanatory research (hypothesis testing). We also found that longitudinal case studies offer better confirmability; while multi-case studies offer better transferability. We propose a set of illustrative research questions to assist with the selection of the appropriate case study method.