This chapter analyses the empirical data with the a priori model. In Langley’s (1999, 694) terms it tries to move "from a shapeless data spaghetti toward some kind of theoretical understanding that does not betray the richness, dynamism, and complexity of the data but that is understandable and potentially useful to others".
The analysis follows the temporal unfolding of the conceptual model elaborated in Chapter 4. Units of analysis are the process elements and process activities, as defined below. The software business is examined from three main perspectives of COTS, tailored and MOTS development approaches. The practicality of this division has been discussed in Section 2.4.
The software contracting process is varied depending on several factors, including the specific business that the software company is in, with whom the company is partnering and building relationships as well as tighter cooperative alliances, and the development and maturity stage of the company. These are some of the main factors affecting the company’s contracting behaviour. In order to be able to analyse this multifarious concept of a contracting process unfolding over time from the first contacts to the termination of the application usage, the process must be first broken into smaller process elements and these elements further into process activities in order to scrutinize the whole contracting life cycle. After the process has been broken down into smaller and important parts (process elements and process activities) these parts that form the process can be analysed more closely. From these parts the conceptual aggregate is again constructed to depict the contracting process and the model. Thus the research approach is from the whole to the parts and is again constructed from the parts to whole.
The empirical data consists of interviews from employees in twelve software producing companies and their experiences in different kinds of software business. The material gathered is usually company managers’ descriptions about the actual contracting processes and of how they see the process unfolding over time. This available data with collected documents is used to evaluate the correspondence of the a priori model and real world. Using material from different stages of relationships development a clear picture of how the software contracting process unfolds, behaves, what contextual elements affects and how the whole process is managed is built. Answers to the questions concerning the theoretical as well as practical concepts that aptly describe the software contracting processes and relationships were tried to be found. How and why do the contracting process develop over time?
For the analysis purposes each of the twelve interviews were collated and inserted into tables as depicted in Appendix D. The process activities found and their process attributes are recorded in order of appearance from the transcribed texts. These tables are then used in the analysis work thoroughly sorting them into different orders to identify different patterns of process behaviours. The tables were constructed and rechecked several times in order to ascertain that the classification of activities did not change and drift during the work as there is also the possibility that the analyser learns more as the work goes on and the terms could inadvertently change its meaning. Further the activities have been tabulated to give a more compact view of them.