On Fri, 5 Dec 2003, Derek M Jones wrote:
> >I hope you are not making the mistake commonly made in industry in
> >assuming that academics don't realise that 3rd year students aren't
> >experts but that they are all they can get because industry is so
> >suspicioos of academia that they wont help out?
> Ok, its industries fault that academics don't know what they are doing (at
> least on this issue).
I think most software engineering academics are acutely
aware that they are criticized in industry for doing irrelevant
research. Many try to make contact and find it very difficult.
However, the original poster on this thread is working in Gail
Murphy's group, which has excellent contacts with industry.
I expect that he may actually be working with people in industry.
> I have found that people in industry are very receptive to being subjects
> in experiments. I ran a simple experiment at the ACCU conference
> and had 45 subjects (out of 250 people attending).
How long was the experiment (per subject) and how much
setup time did it involve? How many independent and dependent
variables were there?
> Somebody even
> suggested I could visit his company to run the experiment on his
> developers (about 15 of them as I recall).
Do you think if the experiment took 16 hours per subject,
and involved them learning a new technique and a domain-specific
language, and then sitting down at a computer and applying it to
experimental software, that he would have ben as willing to have
you visit, install the required software, and take 30
person-days out of the developers' time to run the experiment?
If so, please put me in contact with this person.
> I see the problem as one of making the contacts between industry
> and academia. Academics have little idea how to talk to industry
> and I'm sure academics feel the same way about people in industry.
I have been in the software development industry and have
many friends and acquaintances who have been in it for a long
time. I've seen how hard it is, even for employees, to start
initiatives and get approval for spending time trying new things
out, even starting from a well-established position inside a
company.
There are good reasons for this of course -- industry is
unwilling to spend cash or in-kind resources on things that have
a high risk of not paying off. However, industry people should
be aware of their own unwillingness to cooperate before making
pronouncements about the irrelevance of academia.
--Jamie Andrews.
Associate Professor
Dept. of Computer Science
Univ. of Western Ontario
London, Ont. CANADA N6A 5B7
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.csd.uwo.ca/faculty/andrews/
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