research-article

What do software engineers care about? gaps between research and practice

Authors:

Vladimir Ivanov,

Giancarlo Succi,

Vasilii ZorinAuthors Info & Claims

ESEC/FSE 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 890 - 895

https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3117778

Published: 21 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

It is a cliche to say that there is a gap between research and practice. As the interest and importance in the practical impact of research has been growing, the gap between research and practice is expected to be narrowing. However, our study reveals that there still seems to be a wide gap. We survey so ware engineers about what they care about when developing so ware. We then compare our survey results with the research topics of the papers published in ICSE/FSE recently. We found the following discrepancy: while so ware engineers care more about so ware development productivity than the quality of so ware, papers on research areas closely related to so ware productivity--such as so ware development process management and so ware development techniques--are significantly less published than papers on so ware verification and validation that account for more than half of publications. We also found that so ware engineers are in great need for techniques for accurate effort estimation, and they are not necessarily knowledgable about techniques they can use to meet their needs.

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Cited By

Heldal R(2024)Is generalisation hindering the adoption of your findings?Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686694(348-358)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674805.3686694
Ciancarini PErgasheva SFarina MMubarakshin DSucci G(2023)Agile methodologies between software development and music production: an empirical studyFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2023.11810415Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2023.1181041
Kotti ZGousios GSpinellis D(2023)Impact of Software Engineering Research in Practice: A Patent and Author Survey AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.320821049:4(2020-2038)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3208210
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Index Terms

What do software engineers care about? gaps between research and practice
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Computing industry
      1. Industry statistics
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ESEC/FSE 2017: Proceedings of the 2017 11th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering

August 2017

1073 pages

ISBN:9781450351058

DOI:10.1145/3106237

General Chairs:
Eric Bodden
Paderborn University, Germany / Fraunhofer IEM, Germany
,
Wilhelm Schäfer
Paderborn University, Germany
,
Program Chairs:
Arie van Deursen
Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
,
Andrea Zisman
Open University, UK

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 August 2017

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ESEC/FSE'17

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SIGSOFT

ESEC/FSE'17: Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

September 4 - 8, 2017

Paderborn, Germany

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Overall Acceptance Rate 112 of 543 submissions, 21%

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Cited By

Heldal R(2024)Is generalisation hindering the adoption of your findings?Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement10.1145/3674805.3686694(348-358)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3674805.3686694
Ciancarini PErgasheva SFarina MMubarakshin DSucci G(2023)Agile methodologies between software development and music production: an empirical studyFrontiers in Computer Science10.3389/fcomp.2023.11810415Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2023.1181041
Kotti ZGousios GSpinellis D(2023)Impact of Software Engineering Research in Practice: A Patent and Author Survey AnalysisIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.320821049:4(2020-2038)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3208210
Winter ENowack VBowes DCounsell SHall THaraldsson SWoodward J(2023) Let’s Talk With Developers, Not About Developers: A Review of Automatic Program Repair Research IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.315208949:1(419-436)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3152089
Dushutina E(2023)Software Reliability Modeling and Prediction of Residual Defects for Embedded Systems2023 XXVI International Conference on Soft Computing and Measurements (SCM)10.1109/SCM58628.2023.10159091(292-296)Online publication date: 24-May-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCM58628.2023.10159091
Bugayenko YFarina MKruglov APedrycz WPlaksin YSucci G(2023)Automatically Prioritizing Tasks in Software DevelopmentIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2023.330524911(90322-90334)Online publication date: 2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3305249
Winter ENowack VBowes DCounsell SHall THaraldsson SWoodward JKirbas SWindels EMcBello OAtakishiyev AKells KPagano MRoychoudhury ACadar CKim M(2022)Towards developer-centered automatic program repair: findings from BloombergProceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3540250.3558953(1578-1588)Online publication date: 7-Nov-2022
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Ciancarini PKruglov APedrycz WSalikhov DSucci GHarman MMiller H(2022)Issues in the adoption of the scaled agile frameworkProceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice10.1145/3510457.3513028(175-184)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3510457.3513028
Marijan DSen S(2022)Industry–Academia Research Collaboration and Knowledge Co-creation: Patterns and Anti-patternsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/349451931:3(1-52)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3494519
Ciancarini PKruglov APedrycz WSalikhov DSucci G(2022)Issues in the Adoption of the Scaled Agile Framework2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP)10.1109/ICSE-SEIP55303.2022.9794087(175-184)Online publication date: May-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-SEIP55303.2022.9794087
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