Research Philosophy and Research Approach

Ensuring relevance of Software Engineering (SE) research:

We utilize action-research and empirical approaches in our research and development (R&D) activities, since we are passionate about bridging software engineering academia and practice and we believe that the software engineering theory and techniques should be rigorously evaluated in industrial settings.

In the area of software engineering, research impact is of outmost importance. For example, there are projects (e.g., ACM SIGSOFT Impact Project) and many papers (such as [1] and [2]) measuring and analyzing the impact of software engineering research on software engineering practice. Our research approach and projects are well aligned in this direction, to ensure that our research activities and output have a noticeable impact on the software engineering practice.

A recent paper on relevance of SE research:

Given the importance of practical relevance in software engineering research, together with my collaborators: Markus Borg and Markku Oivo, we conducted and published in 2020 a Multi-vocal Literature Review (MLR) by synthesizing the "community’s voice".

We synthesized the findings and insights of 54 systematically-selected sources which included papers in academic literature and non peer-reviewed sources in the grey literature (GL).

The paper can be accessed here. DOI: 10.1007/s10664-020-09803-0

The free paper PDF can be accessed here.

An online repository of papers on relevance of SE research:

We have compiled a repository of papers (Academic Literature) and sources in the grey literature (GL) on the topic of relevance of software engineering research, as part of the above MLR study. It can be accessed here.

References:

  • [1] Jacky Estublier, David Leblang, André van der Hoek, Reidar Conradi, Geoffrey Clemm, Walter Tichy, and Darcy Wiborg-Weber. Impact of software engineering research on the practice of software configuration management. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 14, 4 (October 2005), 383-430. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1101815.1101817
  • [2] Barbara G. Ryder, Mary Lou Soffa, and Margaret Burnett. The impact of software engineering research on modern progamming languages. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 14, 4 (October 2005), 431-477. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1101815.1101818