Last week I was presenting the paper me and my collogues wrote. You can find it here: Enabling Testing, Design and Refactoring Practices in Remote Locations.  The paper was accepted for ICST 2011 conference workshop, RefTest. It is a short paper about problems and some solutions for practice transfer in distributed team.  However this is not what I would like to write about.

The workshops gave me something to think about. The whole conference was targeted at bridging industry and academia together. Unfortunately at the track I attended there was only two papers and presentation from the industry (one was mine).

I was hoping to hear some new innovative ideas that I would be able to take into my everyday work. After a whole day of workshop sessions I was left with no extra ideas. Plenty of smart academic people were presenting research that I found rather useless in everyday life.

I was also little disappointed after the presentations, as none were actually summarizing the research in a way useful for the industry.

I thought of all those blog articles, posts, tutorials, video presentations, etc. from industry people with the ideas and the way of using it. Of all the technical innovations, processes, practices that got discovered in last few years.

Does it mean that academia lost their leading role in software development industry? There is very little in press about new discoveries in the field of software development.

Thoughts?

Greg