What Do Software Engineers Care About? Gaps Between Research And Practice

It is a cliché 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 software engineers about what they care about when developing software. We then compare our survey results with the research topics of the papers published in ICSE/FSE recently. We found the following discrepancy: while software engineers care more about software development productivity than the quality of software, papers on research areas closely related to software productivity—such as software development process management and software development techniques—are significantly less published than papers on software verification and validation that account for more than half of publications. We also found that software 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.