SER&IPs 2014 – Proceedings

Foreword
We cheerfully welcome you to the pre-workshop proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practices (SER&IPs 2014), which is to be held in Hyderabad, India on Sunday, June 1st 2014, in conjunction with the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014). The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss current state of Software Engineering (SE) research and Industrial Practices (IPs), and advance collaboration to reduce the gap between research and practice. Research is a core part of modern business which can lead to innovation in the form of new products and improvements in existing products and services. Most companies involved in IT solutions and services are facing difficulties in incorporating research output into practice. Therefore, the challenges are to identify the gaps and to discover ways in collaboration to use SE research for the benefit of IPs.

Confessions of an Industrial Researcher: A Typical Bollywood Story (Invited Talk)
Thomas Zimmermann
(Microsoft Research, USA)
There’s a guy. There’s a girl. In the beginning they don’t like each other. Then they fall in love but when they fall in love their families do not accept. In the end, how they unite is the story of many Bollywood movies. Research-practice partnerships are similar. How research and practice can overcome hurdles and join together is the topic of this talk.
At Microsoft Research I am in the fortunate position of being able to bridge two worlds. As part of my work, I collaborate with engineers from large-scale software projects at Microsoft as well as students and professors from universities all over the world. I will describe the collaboration model of the Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) group at Microsoft Research and share my experiences based on several successful collaborations over the past years. I will discuss best practices, challenges, common mistakes, and lessons learned based on several empirical studies related to refactoring, bug reporting, and analytics in general.

Certus: Glimpses of a Centre for Research-Based Innovation in Software Verification and Validation
Sagar Sen
(Simula Research Laboratory, Norway)
What is gratifying to a software engineering researcher? Three of many possible answers to this question are (a) the in- tellectual exercise in developing/disseminating approaches that address novel challenges (b) recognition from impact in a community of researchers (c) widespread use of novel ideas, including software, in the society at large leading to enhancement of human ability and job creation. A culmina- tion of these sources requires an organizational effort. This article presents glimpses of a research-based innovation cen- tre, Certus, to facilitate such a culmination for software engi- neering researchers. Certus has established a body of knowl- edge, methods and tools for the validation and verication (V&V) of software systems in the local Norwegian indus- try. Certus works in close cooperation with five founding user partners and is hosted by the Simula Research Labo- ratory. We present the organizational structure of Certus and describe how Certus's life and health is planned and evaluated on a regular basis as a research-based innovation centre. We hope that this document will serve as a ba- sis to encourage national/international funding schemes to create call for proposals for long-term research-based inno- vation centres. This, we believe, is one way to justify use of tax payers resources in creating a win-win situation for the triple helix: government, researchers and industry.

Making Sense of Academia-Industry Gap in the Evolving Cloud Service Brokerage
Bimlesh Wadhwa, Aditi Jaitly, and Bharti Suri
(National University of Singapore, Singapore; University of Delhi, India; GGS Indraprastha University, India)
Two key elements to bridge the academia-industry gap are communication and collaboration. The purpose of any such effort is co-creation of knowledge and developing continually informed relationships. Cloud computing has got a significant interest from both academia and industry. It offers a myriad of possibilities for software engineering researchers to study the development of multilateral software. With cloud-based products and services growing exponentially in their popularity and usage, there grew a need for a business model to effectively manage cloud costs, resources, capacity, agility and flexibility [3]. Cloud Service Brokers (CSBs) have emerged as a solution to address this growing need and facilitate smooth cloud adoption, management, migration and maintenance for cloud users and providers [4] [5]. According to Gartner, the CSB sector is expected to grow to a whopping $ 100 Billion in revenue by the end of 2014 [1]. However, there is an evident void in the academic research space in the area of CSBs. For example, owing to the absence of a centralized registry of the CSB utilities, it is extremely difficult for cloud users to select a CSB. In this paper, we provide an analysis of industry and academia role in this area highlighting industry issues in which academia can participate.

Overcoming Challenges in Collaboration between Research and Practice: The Agile Research Network
Helen Sharp, Laura Plonka, Katie Taylor, and Peggy Gregory
(Open University, UK; University of Central Lancashire, UK)
There is wide acceptance in the software engineering field that industry and research can gain significantly from each other and there have been several initiatives for encouraging collaboration between the two. However there are some often-quoted challenges in this kind of collaboration. For example, that the timescales of research and practice are incompatible, that research is not seen as relevant for practice, and that research demands a different kind of rigour than practice supports. These are complex challenges that are not always easy to overcome. For the last year we have been using an approach designed to address some of these challenges and to bridge the gap between research and practice, specifically in the agile software development arena. So far we have collaborated successfully with two partners and have investigated two practitioner-driven challenges with agile. In this short paper we will introduce the approach, how it addresses the collaboration challenges between research and practice, and describe the lessons learned from our experience.

An Exploratory Study on Reuse at Google
Veronika Bauer, Jonas Eckhardt, Benedikt Hauptmann, and Manuel Klimek
(TU München, Germany; Google, Germany)
Software reuse is a challenging and multifaceted topic. Significant research effort has been spent to address technical and organizational aspects. However, adoption of proposed practices and novel approaches often proceeds slowly. Additionally, little is known on how reuse is currently effected in practice and which solutions have proven useful. This paper aims to shed light on the matter by studying the current practice of reuse at Google. We conduct an exploratory study with a total of 49 participants of which 39 answered our online questionnaire and 10 participated in our 1h interviews. We assess reuse practices, success factors and challenges and collect ideas for improvement. We distill our findings to provide practitioners with examples of scalable reuse practices and detail on prerequisites required to implement/tailor a similar reuse approach. Furthermore, we point out open issues to support researchers and practitioners alike to align their efforts for developing solutions.

Why Is Dynamic Analysis Not Used as Extensively as Static Analysis: An Industrial Study
Radhika D. Venkatasubramanyam and Sowmya G. R.
(Siemens, India)
Code Assessments using static and dynamic analyses are important for the maintenance of code quality of software in the industry. These analyses, though understood to be beneficial, have several practical limitations. The intent of our study was to understand the usage of these analyses across various teams in Siemens during code assessments, reasons for the success of static analysis and the challenges in dynamic analysis. The evaluation was conducted through a survey of the practices of developers in different development teams. Additionally interviews were conducted with expert reviewers and their experiences documented. Our study has revealed that institutionalization of code quality initiatives and customized toolkit support for static analysis are some of the key reasons for the successful implementation of static analysis. Some of the problems hindering the widespread adoption of dynamic analysis include the direct dependency with test cases, scalability, and understandability of the results. Various implications of the results are discussed, including the possible improvements that could increase the acceptance of dynamic analysis on a regular basis.

A Formal Systems Engineering Approach in Practice: An Experience Report
Wolfgang Böhm, Maximilian Junker, Andreas Vogelsang, Sabine Teufl, Ralf Pinger, and Karsten Rahn
(TU München, Germany; fortiss, Germany; Siemens, Germany)
This paper reports on a successful research transfer project executed in collaboration between Siemens AG, fortiss GmbH and Technische Universität München. The goal of the project was to evaluate if the SPES modeling framework (SPES MF), which has recently been developed by an industrial and academic consortium, and which is implemented within the tool AutoFOCUS3, can be directly applied to a real-life, productive, industrial system. To achieve this, we performed a case study, in which we created models for requirements and functionality for a part of a Siemens train automation system. The results indicate that the SPES MF can indeed be beneficially used in this context. Furthermore, by applying such a structured modeling approach, we were able to reveal several issues in the original requirements specifications. In this paper, we report on our experiences in setting up and performing such kind of collaboration between industry and academia. We discuss the success factors as well as problems that we encountered during the project.