Enablers and Impediments for Collaborative Research in Software Testing: An Empirical Exploration

TL;DR

This paper explores the key factors that enable effective industry-academia collaboration in software testing, emphasizing the importance of technology, openness, and dedicated tooling to foster independent, evidence-based research.

Contribution

It identifies critical enablers and impediments for collaborative software testing research and illustrates these with a case study involving automated test generation with Bombardier Transportation.

Findings

Technology significantly enhances collaboration effectiveness.

Openness to disclose research results is crucial.

Dedicated tooling platforms support collaborative efforts.

Abstract

When it comes to industrial organizations, current collaboration efforts in software engineering research are very often kept in-house, depriving these organizations off the skills necessary to build independent collaborative research. The current trend, towards empirical software engineering research, requires certain standards to be established which would guide these collaborative efforts in creating a strong partnership that promotes independent, evidence-based, software engineering research. This paper examines key enabling factors for an efficient and effective industry-academia collaboration in the software testing domain. A major finding of the research was that while technology is a strong enabler to better collaboration, it must be complemented with industrial openness to disclose research results and the use of a dedicated tooling platform. We use as an example an automated test generation approach that has been developed in the last two years collaboratively with Bombardier Transportation AB in Sweden.