Article Name: A study to support agile methods more effectively through traceability

The purpose of doing this assignment to understand the language or learn grammar choices used in

Software Engineering research articles and also to identify grammar choices with the reference of Swales and

Feak (2012). The article used for this assignment is same as used for article analysis assignment.

The first example is Among these, we can find Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Story test-Driven

Development (SDD) [1] where the author used the word We to refer other researchers or showing the

collaborative nature of research. This shows that convention one [2]of academic writing is followed in this article

but using we in this sentence does not give any clear idea about is it referring to other co-authors who work on

this paper or readers. It would be better if they used some other word that makes it clear such as this paper

proposed.

In this example This paper studies some agile development processes and methodologies, such as XP,

TDD, and SDD, from a traceability point of view. [1], it indicates two conventions such as convention one [2]

which is use of word this instead of using any first person word such as you and I and convention four [2]

because it explained in detail about the methodologies they will be discussing later instead of using any specific

or general terms such as etc. The purpose of using this word is to avoid the first person pronouns and making

it clear that methods and processes are discussed in detail in this paper.

In this example This paper is organized as follows: after Sect. 1, Sect. 2 states basic traceability

concepts and studies agile processes from the traceability perspective. [1], it indicates that author is avoiding to

be more specific and used generalized words. This example follows the convention one [2] of academic writing

style. The alternative of this sentence can be possible by using We organized this paper instead of This

paper is organized .. This example also follows the convention five [2] of academic writing style choice by

using passive voice sentence structure.

 In this example A trace is defined in the IEEE Standard Glossary of Software Engineering

Terminology [40] as a relationship between two or more products of the development process [1], it shows that

authors of this article want their readers to know the basic definition of terminologies which they will be using

to discuss in detail later so readers can have a better idea what the authors are trying to say.

In this article, they followed academic writing style and avoid using non-academic styles such as

contractions, active voice sentence and first-person pronouns. The citation style used in this paper is IEEE. They

wrote many sentences in present tense because it is possible that the things they proposed might not happen or

discuss before and also they want their audience to feel that processes and methodologies can be used whenever

they want work on it. The interesting thing I noted in this article is that author used the present tense sentences

in background section which I thought that it should be in past because background represents history. This is

something unusual for me. After analyzing the article of my field I get the little idea of what kind of academic

writing choices are relevant in writing a research paper and what kind of things I need to avoid.

References

[1] A. Espinoza and J. Garbajosa, "A study to support agile methods more effectively through," Innovations in
System and Software Engineering, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 53-69, 2011.
[2] J. M. Swales and B. C. Feak, Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 3rd Edition, Michigan: Michigan
Publishing University of Michigan Press, 2012.

Note:
In this paper, I use the IEEE citation style, so I am unable to write page numbers for direct quotation.