Practitioners' Perception of RE Research Relevance An Ongoing Study X. Franch, D. Méndez Fernández, A. Vogelsang, C. Coupette, J. Carver, R. Heldal, E. Knauss, M. Oriol, G.H. Travassos, T. Zimmermann

Outline Motivation and background Presentation of the study. Phases Current status. Some preliminary numbers Words of caution Next steps

Motivation Industry: demands RE solutions that work in practice The practical impact of research contributions, and whether they are in tune with industry needs, is still today not totally clear Academy: plethora of promising, well founded contributions to the RE field

Previous studies

Questions investigated in the study RQ1 What is the relevance of RE research to practitioners in industry? RQ2 Which research ideas do practitioners rate most highly? RQ3 Which research problems do practitioners think are most important for the RE community to address? RQ4 Do work with explicit ties to industry have higher practical relevance than other work? RQ5 Do practitioners’ perceptions and views differ depending upon their roles? RQ1 What is the relevance of RE research to practitioners in industry? RQ2 Which research ideas do practitioners rate most highly? RQ3 Which research problems do practitioners think are most important for the RE community to address? RQ4 Do papers with explicit ties to industry have higher practical relevance than other papers? Literature-based study

Study execution 435 papers from 5 major conferences in the period 2010 – 2016 1 short sentence summarizing the paper according to some template Dissemination through lists, groups, colleagues, grandma’s, … 147 valid responses, each one including 15 evaluations to summaries

Current status All papers classified according to a taxonomy Mix of: Text-based classification When the data extraction protocol was well-suited Human-expert classification Special discussion on the “what” dimension What is the paper about?

Varied demographics

Overall perception

Example: subjects

Example: documentation (1)

Example: documentation (2)

Words of caution (aka threats to validity) Internal Abstract comprehension External Representativeness of the papers Representativeness of respondents Conclusion The meaning of “perception” Construct Methodology robustness

Next steps Completing data analysis Reporting the results Answering the research questions Reporting the results All data made public Conducting replications More respondents for the same set of papers Extending the set of papers Temporal evolution

Interested in contributing? https://ww2.unipark.de/uc/RE-Author/36f9/ Open until August 31st

Contact: Xavier Franch, franch@essi.upc.edu