What is the impact of software engineering research on current practices in industry? In this paper, I report on my direct experience as a PhD post-doc working in software engineering research projects, and then spending the following five years as an engineer in two different companies (the first one being the same I worked in collaboration with during my post-doc). Given a background in software engineering research, what cutting-edge techniques and tools from academia did I use in my daily work when developing and testing the systems of these companies? Regarding validation and verification (my main area of research), the answer is rather short: as far as I can tell, only FindBugs. In this paper, I report on why this was the case, and discuss all the challenging, complex open problems we face in industry and which somehow are “neglected” in the academic circles. In particular, I will first discuss what actual tools I could use in my daily work, such as JaCoCo and Selenium. Then, I will discuss the main open problems I faced, particularly related to environment simulators, unit and web testing. After that, popular topics in academia are presented, such as UML, regression and mutation testing. Their lack of impact on the type of projects I worked on in industry is then discussed. Finally, from this industrial experience, I provide my opinions about how this situation can be improved, in particular related to how academics are evaluated, and advocate for a greater involvement into open-source projects.
In the past, there were attempts from SIGSOFT (the Impact Project https: www.sigsoft.org impact.html ) to keep track of and promote academic impact on software engineering practice @cite_5 . Different success stories were discussed, where ideas'' investigated in academia were then considered and adopted in industry. However, it was also estimated that such transfer of ideas takes roughly 15-20 years. Unfortunately, such very valuable initiative from SIGSOFT seems has been abandoned for many years (since 2008) because the project was a volunteer effort, supported only by some very modest funding for travel to project meetings. Eventually the participants slowly but surely felt the stronger pull of their individual research endeavors and we suspended our activities''. Private communication with one of the Impact Project organizers.
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The impact project provides a solid and scholarly assessment of the impact software engineering research has had on software engineering practice. The assessment takes the form of a series of studies and briefings, each involving literature searches and, where possible, personal interviews.