Working with Industry: Stories of Successful and Failed Research-Industry Collaborations on Empirical Software Engineering

摘要

The software engineering industry should be the laboratory of much, perhaps most, of the empirical software engineering research. Not only would this create a more realistic context and higher external validity of the empirical research, it would also ease the result transfer and make the results more convincing for the industry. Unfortunately, this is currently not the case. About 90% of software engineering experiments are, for example, conducted with students instead of software professionals as subjects. One reason for the lack of industry studies may be that an efficient and sustainable give-and-take-based collaboration between research and industry can be difficult to establish. The collaborations are frequently fragile, end before the research is completed, and lead to a waste of resources for both the researchers and the industrial partners. This paper presents stories and lessons learned from failed and successful research-industry collaborations. It has a focus on experience with the use of non-traditional collaboration types, such as payment to get industry participation in experiments, trade-based collaboration, lightweight collaborations at industry venues, and network-based collaborations. It is argued that empirical software engineering research should more often consider the use of alternative types of research-industry collaborations than those traditionally chosen.