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.
The discrepancy between industry and academia is also clear when looking at what topics are discussed at practitioner conferences compared to the academic ones @cite_32 . For example, in the context of testing, practitioners are more interested on mobile and agile testing, whereas academics seems to focus more on model-based and combinatorial testing, which are topics seldom discussed at practitioner conferences @cite_32 .
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To determine how industry and academia approach software testing, researchers compared the titles of presentations from selected conferences in each of the two communities. The results shed light on the root cause of low industry–academia collaboration and led to suggestions on how to improve this situation.