Practical experiences in designing and conducting empirical studies in industry-academia collaboration

More and more, software engineering researchers are motivated to solve real problems that bring value to industry. An example is the industry-academia collaboration described in this paper among everis, an IT consulting firm, and the GESSI research group at UPC. The goal of this paper is twofold: to evaluate the success of the collaboration, and to report the experience with conducting empirical studies in the industry and lessons learnt. We evaluated our collaboration with an existing model for technology transfer, and performed a focus group discussion to identify challenges we have faced. After initialization and alignment of the collaboration, a high maturity level has been achieved: we have obtained the first results in form of proposed solutions, scientific publications, and pilots run in real projects. In spite of this positive progress, further initiatives need to be undertaken in the last phases of the collaboration to achieve high degrees of maturity in deployment impact, industry benefit and innovativeness. Evaluating the collaboration has been positive, since we identified the next steps to be taken to achieve a high degree of technology transfer and innovation dissemination. We think it is a needed step in industry-academia collaborations in order to improve their success.