How Software Engineering Research Overlooks Local Industry: A Smaller Economy Perspective

TL;DR

This paper highlights the neglect of local industry issues in software engineering research from smaller economies, emphasizing the need for better collaboration and tailored research approaches.

Contribution

It provides a reflexive analysis of the research-industry gap in smaller economies and offers recommendations to improve collaboration and relevance.

Findings

Research-industry gap is more pronounced in smaller economies.

Current research often overlooks local industry needs.

Recommendations aim to bridge the gap and foster collaboration.

Abstract

The software engineering researchers from countries with smaller economies, particularly non-English speaking ones, represent valuable minorities within the software engineering community. As researchers from Poland, we represent such a country. We analyzed the ICSE FOSE (Future of Software Engineering) community survey through reflexive thematic analysis to show our viewpoint on key software community issues. We believe that the main problem is the growing research-industry gap, which particularly impacts smaller communities and small local companies. Based on this analysis and our experiences, we present a set of recommendations for improvements that would enhance software engineering research and industrial collaborations in smaller economies.