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Studying work practices in the context of Global Software Development (GSD) projects entails multiple opportunities and challenges for the researchers. Understanding and tackling these challenges requires a careful and rigor application of research methods.

We want to contribute to the understanding of the challenges of studying GSD by reflecting on several obstacles we had to deal with when conducting ethnographically-informed research on offshoring in German small to medium-sized enterprises.

The material for this paper is based on reflections and field notes from two research projects: an exploratory ethnographic field study, and a study that was framed as a Business Ethnography. For the analysis, we took a Grounded Theory-oriented coding and analysis approach in order to identify issues and challenges documented in our research notes.

We introduce the …