  A growing number of empirical software engineering researchers suggest that a
complementary focus on theory is required if the discipline is to mature. A
first step in theory-building involves the establishment of suitable
theoretical constructs. For researchers studying software projects, the lack of
a theoretical construct for context is problematic for both experimentation and
effort estimation. For experiments, insufficiently understood contextual
factors confound results, and for estimation, unstated contextual factors
affect estimation reliability. We have earlier proposed a framework that we
suggest may be suitable as a construct for context i.e. represents a minimal,
spanning set for the space of software contexts. The framework has six
dimensions, described as Who, Where, What, When, How and Why. In this paper, we
report the outcomes of a pilot study to test its suitability by categorising
contextual factors from the software engineering literature into the framework.
We found that one of the dimensions, Why, does not represent context, but
rather is associated with objectives. We also identified some factors that do
not clearly fit into the framework and require further investigation. Our
contributions are the pursuing of a theoretical approach to understanding
software context, the initial establishment and evaluation of a construct for
context and the exposure of a lack of clarity of meaning in many 'contexts'
currently applied as factors for estimating project outcomes.
