As former academic and current industrial developer, I suspect that the opportunities for academic/industrial collaboration are very large, even for topics relevant to professional programmers and software engineers. The key or trick is recognize the impact on the industrial organization of the selected research methodology and ensure, if possible, that the research has some direct, immediate benefit to the industrial organization.
For example, if what you want to do is take 50 experienced programmers, do a two day training, and then run a 4 hour study, your best bet is to ask a national research funding organization for the money and then hire the programmers yourself as contractors. On the other hand, if what you say is that you'd like to send in three trained observers and have them observe 50 programmers for a week each to find out what actually consumes their time, tell me when you expect them to arrive and I'll see that my organization arranges office space and telephones for them. (You'll still have to find funding for their salaries and other expenses.) Why the difference? Methodology 1 translates into a 100% sure two and half day schedule slip; for most software managers who already dealing with unreasonable schedules, agreeing to a two day scheduel slip is equivalent to agreeing to a salary cut. Furthermore, at best, it will yield a handful of superlative comparision, a is better than b, c is better than d, that may or may not be relevant to the organization in question, but, in the big picture are going to be but single bricks in a very large wall. Methodolgy 2 might actually cost as much programmer time as methodology 1, but it's less likely to produce an overall schedule slip, and it might yield multiple ways in which that particular industrial organization can improve its practices. In fact, for the manager in question, it might give her/him the leaverage for their next promotion. I recognize that using anything other than a classical experimental psychology with all the statistical trappings may create problems in the home department of the reseacher, particularly if that department does not have enough social science expertise to recognize that ethnomethodological and verbal protocol studies are well accepted approaches to behavioral research. On the other hand, the ease of publishing this kind of research should convince even uninformed colleagues that this is a valid research approach. Ruven Brooks -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Thomas Green Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 4:49 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Penny for the guy: was RE: PPIG discuss: Loss of context experienced by programmers Umm. The rift between academic and industrial reappears .... Here's something to bear in mind, maybe? The rewards, intrinsic motivations, opportunities for action, and sources of esteem for academics and industrial people seem to be often very different. It doesn't make a lot of sense to criticise "them" for being different from "us". So don't let's let ourselves slip towards blame games. Opportunities are limited on both sides. Obviously, industrial people have to make some money, and may not have the opportunity to support research. Perhaps less obviously, most academics have training and experience in only one area of research. They don't have the opportunity to do any other kind, even if what they're trained in turns out not to be the most "relevant to real life" as they say. The other thing to remember is that many different people are doing many different things in "real life" and therefore it's pretty well impossible to say that a piece of academic research is completely useless. "Real life" is not just professional programmers and software engineers dealing with horrendous amounts of code, it's also hobbyists and non-specialists and spreadsheet users and scripters and students and so on. We all need to be a little careful of making generalisations from our own everyday situation, and of judging outcomes only by one criterion. We can't create collaboration by sheer will power. The phrase that goes around these days is evidence-based practice, in which the people who are actually doing something in the world make their decisions on the current state of the evidence. This can be encouraged by funding academics to create useful summaries of the current state of the evidence, and of course by creating research initiatives, funded at least partly from outside academia. This seems to work in some health-related areas, although I don't know in detail how well it works. PPIG people have made attempts in these directions but there have been problems (though Derek Jones's mighty tome is maybe a success). If any of you folk out there see your way to furthering the cause of evidence-based practice, that would be good news and I'm sure it would be well received by both industrialist and academic types. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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/
