As you may know, a few colleagues and I have been trying to find ways to close the gap between software development research and practice. We believe that in recent years there has been much research that practitioners would find sound and useful, if they knew it existed and how to interpret it. We also believe that many researchers would still benefit from learning and negotiating with practitioners on which questions are important in real life and what parts of their proposals do not ring true in practical experience.
One of the problems we found is that there are few good channels to communicate and discuss interesting software engineering research news. This is particularly so in the electronic media space: although a couple handfuls of researchers have their own blogs, they we tend to discuss their own work in them, not to provide pointers to interesting stuff happening at other labs and in other areas of their field. Talking about this state of affairs, Greg Wilson pointed out that we really don’t have something like Lambda the Ultimate for software development, and that we really should.
And so we created It will never work in theory, a new software development research blog. As we explain in the introductory post, we want this blog to be a bridge between research and practice. To begin with, it’s modeled after LtU: we’ll be posting abstracts or excerpts from academic papers that are relevant in practice, and we hope that, eventually, a mixed community of researchers and software professionals will grow to discuss them. We’ll see how it evolves. So if you’re interested in the topic, please visit the site, subscribe, and join the conversation. And if you think of good material that we should cover (note: preferably not your own work! 😉 ), please send it my way.
Catenary 