Jamie, >> >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.
I would not characterize it that way. I think the idea that academics do research that one day may or may not be useful in 10+ years is generally accepted. It is the claims that past and current research (at least in software engineering) is relevant today that causes much disbelief. > Many try to make contact and find it very difficult. Yes it is hard. But researchers in other domains have equal difficulties, but don't cope out (well perhaps some do, I don't know). >> 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? A very simple experiment (I slotted in to fit the available time). I will make the papers available once it appears in C Vu (the journal of www.accu.org). >> 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? I think software engineering academics (come to that, all people investigating this issue) are trying to run before they can crawl. We need more basic research before studies involving so many variables can be carried out. > If so, please put me in contact with this person. You must be joking. I would keep them a very closely guarded secret for my own experiments. >> 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. From the companies perspective there does not appear to be much return on investment for them. I think the secret is to appeal to developers direct, to take part in their spare time. derek -- Derek M Jones tel: +44 (0) 1252 520 667 Knowledge Software Ltd mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Applications Standards Conformance Testing http://www.knosof.co.uk ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PPIG Discuss List ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Discuss admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/discuss Announce admin: http://limitlessmail.net/mailman/listinfo/announce PPIG Discuss archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/discuss%40ppig.org/
