SoftCoDeR approach: promoting Software Engineering Academia-Industry partnership using CMD, DSR and ESE

Tiago S. da Silva,Joelma Choma,Luciana A. M. Zaina

doi:10.1186/s40411-016-0034-5

Abstract

The Academia-Industry partnership has been increasingly encouraged in the software development field. The main focus of the initiatives is driven by the collaborative work where the scientific research work meets the real needs of the Industry. Aiming to contribute to this effort we have proposed an approach called SoftCoDeR (Software Cooperative Design Research) that combines CMD (Cooperative Method Development), a method of Action Research, to concepts of DSR (Design Science Research). We have applied the SoftCoDeR approach in a software development company to support a research and development project aiming to integrate User Experience practices into the agile software development process. In this paper, we present new findings about this approach that has been extended with the use of Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) practices to conduct experimental validations of artifacts before putting them in industrial practice.

Highlights

The need for sharing experiences and knowledge between Academia and software Industry has become increasingly evident, both have demonstrated difficulties on establishing an effective relationship, mainly because they usually have different viewpoints
According to Baskerville (2008), “doing” design science may look a lot like ‘doing’ action research, there are fundamental differences between them such as: (1) Action Research (AR) is focused on problem solving through social and organizational change, while Design Science Research (DSR) is focused on problem solving by creating and positioning an artifact in a natural setting; and (2) AR is clearly centered on discovery-through-action, while DSR is clearly centered on discovery-through-design
We describe in details a SoftCoDeR cycle using Experimental Software Engineering (ESE) to validate artifacts in academic environment before putting them into industrial practice

Summary

Introduction

The need for sharing experiences and knowledge between Academia and software Industry has become increasingly evident, both have demonstrated difficulties on establishing an effective relationship, mainly because they usually have different viewpoints. Mechanisms have been proposed to balancing the academic and industrial needs, and to promote a strategic alignment between the interests of Academia and software Industry (Santos et al 2012). From this perspective, researchers need to develop skills - with active role – to understand and deal with practical problems observed from the experience of teams of software developers during the investigation, in order to maximize the use of the research results in the practice. Choma et al Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development (2016) 4:8 and Achatz 2007) In this context, technology refers to any artifacts produced by activities within software development, including concepts, tools, techniques, methods and methodologies.

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