  Context: Cultural aspects are of high importance as they guide people's
behaviour and thus, influence how people apply methods and act in projects. In
recent years, software engineering research emphasized the need to analyze the
challenges of specific cultural characteristics. Investigating the influence of
cultural characteristics is challenging due to the multi-faceted concept of
culture. People's behaviour, their beliefs and underlying values are shaped by
different layers of culture, e.g., regions, organizations, or groups. In this
study, we focus on agile methods, which are agile approaches that focus on
underlying values, collaboration and communication. Thus, cultural and social
aspects are of high importance for their successful use in practice. Objective:
In this paper, we address challenges that arise when using the model of
cultural dimensions by Hofstede to characterize specific cultural values. This
model is often used when discussing cultural influences in software
engineering. Method: As a basis, we conducted an exploratory, multiple case
study, consisting of two cases in Japan and two in Germany. Contributions: In
this study, we observed that cultural characteristics of the participants
differed significantly from cultural characteristics that would typically be
expected for people from the respective country. This drives our conclusion
that for studies in empirical software engineering that address cultural
factors, a case-specific analysis of the characteristics is needed.
