How practitioners perceive the relevance of ESEM research

• Main Authors: CARVER, Jeffrey C., DIESTE, Oscar, KRAFT, Nicholas A., David LO, ZIMMERMANN, Thomas
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: ESEM Conference; Industrial Relevance; Survey; Computer Sciences; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3579; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4580/viewcontent/PracticionersPerceiveRelevanceESEM_2016.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Background: The relevance of ESEM research to industry practitioners is key to the long-term health of the conference. Aims: The goal of this work is to understand how ESEM research is perceived within the practitioner community and provide feedback to the ESEM community ensure our research remains relevant. Method: To understand how practitioners perceive ESEM research, we replicated previous work by sending a survey to several hundred industry practitioners at a number of companies around the world. We asked the survey participants to rate the relevance of the research described in 156 ESEM papers published between 2011 and 2015. Results: We received 9,941 ratings by 437 practitioners who labeled ideas as Essential, Worth-while, Unimportant, or Unwise. The results showed that overall, industrial practitioners find the work published in ESEM to be valuable: 67% of all ratings were essential or worthwhile. We found no correlation between citation count and perceived relevance of the papers. Through a qualitative analysis, we also identified a number of research themes on which practitioners would like to see an increased research focus. Conclusions: The work published in ESEM is generally relevant to industrial practitioners. There are a number of topics for which those practitioners would like to see additional research undertaken.