Abstract
Research collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps ensure the industrial relevance of academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners in the community believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaboration (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE) research is relatively low, creating a barrier between research and practice. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to explore and characterize the state of IAC with respect to industrial needs, developed solutions, impacts of the projects and also a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study. To address the above goal, we conducted an opinion survey among researchers and practitioners with respect to their experience in IAC. Our dataset includes 101 data points from IAC projects conducted in 21 different countries. Our findings include: (1) the most popular topics of the IAC projects, in the dataset, are: software testing, quality, process, and project managements; (2) over 90% of IAC projects result in at least one publication; (3) almost 50% of IACs are initiated by industry, busting the myth that industry tends to avoid IACs; and (4) 61% of the IAC projects report having a positive impact on their industrial context, while 31% report no noticeable impacts or were “not sure”. To improve this situation, we present evidence-based recommendations to increase the success of IAC projects, such as the importance of testing pilot solutions before using them in industry. This study aims to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, and benefit researchers and practitioners. Using the data and evidence presented in this paper, they can conduct more successful IAC projects in SE by being aware of the challenges and how to overcome them, by applying best practices (patterns), and by preventing anti-patterns.
Highlights
Background and Related Workwe first provide an overview of the related work
Formulated using the Goal, Question, Metric (GQM) approach (Solingen and Berghout 1999), the overall goal of this study is to characterize a set of industry-academia collaborations (IAC) projects in Software Engineering (SE), with respect to the challenges, patterns, and anti-patterns identified by the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study (Garousi et al 2016a)
A number of projects were initiated to improve various aspects, e.g., P1’s goal was to improve test models used for model-based testing, P5 aimed at improving requirements specifications, and P13 aimed at improving the tool-support traceability analysis in embedded software
Summary
This study aims to contribute to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, and benefit researchers and practitioners. Formulated using the Goal, Question, Metric (GQM) approach (Solingen and Berghout 1999), the overall goal of this study is to characterize a set of IAC projects in SE, with respect to the challenges, patterns, and anti-patterns identified by the SLR study (Garousi et al 2016a). Our goal was to gather as many data points from researchers and practitioners world-wide
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