1. 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

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

3. 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

4. Previous studies

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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?

8. Varied demographics

9. Overall perception

10. Example: subjects

11. Example: documentation (1)

12. Example: documentation (2)

13. 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

14. 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

15. Interested in contributing?
Open until August 31st

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