Can we do useful industrial software engineering research in the shadow of lean and agile?

The software industry is rapidly changing from traditional ways of working to lean and agile development methods using self-organized feature development teams that are performing a much larger part of the development process than before. Face to face communication will replace many of the design artifacts used for work-in-progress, such as defect reports and feature system design specifications. This type of data will cease to exist when the feature is developed or the problem is solved, and will not be readily available to researchers. As a consequence, software engineering research in industry will have to rely primarily on participatory and observational methods.