Industry-academia collaboration for realism in software engineering research: Insights and recommendations
Qunying Song, Per Runeson · Information and Software Technology · 2022
Effective industry-academia collaboration may increase software engineering research relevance by increased realism, yet very challenging for reasons like confidentiality concerns, different objectives and priorities. We analyse industry-academia collaboration scenarios based on our own experiences as Ph.D. student and supervisor, and provide insights and recommendations to facilitate future collaborations with industry. We first present our industry-academia collaboration experiences that span over two and a half years with different companies. Then, we analyse both facilitators and problems from those scenarios and synthesize recommendations based on that. Five different scenarios are analysed, including both success and failure scenarios. Reflections and insights into these experiences as well as some general recommendations are presented. We believe such experiences and insights are helpful for academic researchers to pursue industry-academia collaboration. We plan to continuously report our experience and provide our suggestions for effective collaboration with industry.