What Do Sofware Engineers Care About? Gaps between Research and Practice Vladimir Ivanov Innopolis University, Russia v.ivanov@innopolis.ru Alan Rogers Innopolis University, Russia a.rogers@innopolis.ru Giancarlo Succi Innopolis University, Russia g.succi@innopolis.ru Jooyong Yi Innopolis University, Russia j.yi@innopolis.ru Vasilii Zorin Innopolis University, Russia v.zorin@innopolis.ru ABSTRACT It is a cliché to say that there is a gap between research and practice. As the interest and importance in the practical impact of research has been growing, the gap between research and practice is ex- pected to be narrowing. However, our study reveals that there still seems to be a wide gap. We survey software engineers about what they care about when developing software. We then compare our survey results with the research topics of the papers published in ICSE/FSE recently. We found the following discrepancy: while software engineers care more about software development produc- tivity than the quality of software, papers on research areas closely related to software productivityÐsuch as software development process management and software development techniquesÐare signifcantly less published than papers on software verifcation and validation that account for more than half of publications. We also found that software engineers are in great need for techniques for accurate efort estimation, and they are not necessarily knowl- edgable about techniques they can use to meet their needs. CCS CONCEPTS · Social and professional topics → Industry statistics; · Soft- ware and its engineering → Software creation and manage- ment; KEYWORDS Software Engineering Research and Practice, Survey ACM Reference format: Vladimir Ivanov, Alan Rogers, Giancarlo Succi, Jooyong Yi, and Vasilii Zorin. 2017. What Do Software Engineers Care About? Gaps between Research and Practice. In Proceedings of 2017 11th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Paderborn, Germany, September 4ś8, 2017 (ESEC/FSE’17), 6 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3117778 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. ESEC/FSE’17, September 4ś8, 2017, Paderborn, Germany © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5105-8/17/09. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3106237.3117778 1 INTRODUCTION Industrial impact has been gaining attention of many researchers nowadays. Industry tracks, such as ESEC/FSE industry track, have provided for researchers pathways to industrial impact. Typically, researchers team up with industry partners and apply research re- sults to real-world problems of industry. As a result, the doorway to tech-transfer has widened ś research results developed in academia are being transferred to industry through this doorway. In this paper we consider the opposite direction, that is, the transfer of industry problems to academia. In other words, we analyze whether software engineering (SE) researchers are solving problems that industry practitionersÐmore specifcally, software engineersścare about. Given limited resources available for research as compared to the gigantic size of software industry, researchers need to be strategic in order to maximize their impact. We are not arguing here that researchers should tackle only the problems practitioners care about. The traditional research efort of exploring new ideas without being necessarily constrained by industry needs should be continued. However, if the aim of a researcher is to make an impact on industry, understanding what practitioners care about can be a useful guideline to achieve the aim. Pushing Research to Practice. The ACM SIGSOFT Impact project assesses the impact of SE research on practice [24]. Under this um- brella project, diverse SE research feldsÐsuch as programming languages [28], software confguration management [10], runtime assertion checking [7], middleware technology [9], and code in- spections and reviews [27]Ðhave been assessed about their impact on practice. Inspired by the Impact project, Lo et al. [19] performed a lightweight survey with software engineers working in Microsoft to investigate how software engineers perceive SE research. The as- sessment of these previous studies is generally positive: SE research has made an impact on practice [24], and the current SE research seems generally relevant to SE practices exercised in Microsoft [19]. Pulling Practical Needs from Industry. While these previous studies investigate the fow from research to practice as to how impactful and healthy the research-to-practice fow is, the opposite direction of the fowÐfrom practice to researchÐis relatively rarely studied. In other words, there has been little research done on the issue of łwhat industry wants from research"Ðincidentally, how- ever, ICSE 2011 hosted a panel with this same title. The following excerpt from the abstract of the panel casts a diferent shade from the aforementioned studies: łHalf of the people who attended the frst 890