Industry-academia collaboration for realism in software engineering research: Insights and recommendations

Context: Effective industry-academia collaboration may increase software engineering research relevance by increased realism, yet very challenging for reasons like confidentiality concerns, different objectives and priorities. Objective: We analyse industry-academia collaboration scenarios based on our own experiences as Ph.D. student and supervisor, and provide insights and recommendations to facilitate future collaborations with industry. Method: We first present our industry-academia collaboration experiences that span over two and a half years with different companies. Then, we analyse both facilitators and problems from those scenarios and synthesize recommendations based on that. Results: Five different scenarios are analysed, including both success and failure scenarios. Reflections and insights into these experiences as well as some general recommendations are presented. Conclusion: We believe such experiences and insights are helpful for academic researchers to pursue industry-academia collaboration. We plan to continuously report our experience and provide our suggestions for effective collaboration with industry.