  BACKGROUND: Software engineering is a human activity. People naturally make
sense of their activities and experience through storytelling. But storytelling
does not appear to have been properly studied by software engineering research.
AIM: We explore the question: what contribution can storytelling make to
human--centric software engineering research? METHOD: We define concepts,
identify types of story and their purposes, outcomes and effects, briefly
review prior literature, identify several contributions and propose next steps.
RESULTS: Storytelling can, amongst other contributions, contribute to data
collection, data analyses, ways of knowing, research outputs, interventions in
practice, and advocacy, and can integrate with evidence and arguments. Like all
methods, storytelling brings risks. These risks can be managed. CONCLUSION:
Storytelling provides a potential counter--balance to abstraction, and an
approach to retain and honour human meaning in software engineering.
