Lionel Briand believes that software engineering research places too little attention on engineering and design aspects, focusing instead on novel but impractical solutions. He suggests increasing collaboration with industry to better define problems and priorities based on realistic contexts and domains. This would lead to research that is more applicable and impactful for the future by considering practicality and scalability.

1. .lusoftware verification & validation
VVS
The State of Software
Engineering Research
Lionel Briand
FSE’16, November 16, 2016

2. Question 1
• Do you believe our community as a whole is achieving the
right balance of science, engineering, and design in its
combined research efforts?
• Engineering and design aspects do not get nearly enough
attention.
• We need to devise not only novel, sound solutions but also
practical and scalable ones.
• Significant variations across domains and contexts.
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3. Question 2
• What new or existing areas of research do you think our community
should pay more attention to?
• The problem is not with the areas we focus on, but with the dominant
paradigm of academic research.
• Research largely disconnected from practical engineering needs and
priorities.
• We fail to recognize the significant variations across domains and
context.
• In our discipline, context factors (including human ones), working
assumptions, make a huge difference.
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4. Question 3
• Do you have novel suggestions for how we could improve our
research methods to increase the impact of software engineering
research in the near and distant future?
• More collaborative research with industry, leading to a better
definition and prioritization of problems, realistic working
assumptions in various application domains, better evaluation of
practicality and scalability.
• We are not a branch of computer science. We need to accept the
fact that industrial (applied) research, driven by practicality and
scalability considerations, is a necessary component of an
engineering discipline.
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