
Like Doughnut and Hole? Or Fish and Bicycle?

Insight into the age-old question of the relationship between industry and academia can be gained on Wednesday and Thursday of the ICSE 2001 conference.  The IIP (Invited Industry Presentations) track on Wednesday provided industrial perspectives on the challenges of software development practice, technology drivers for Web and mobile phone service, and frontiers of component technologies.  On tap for Thursday are the CSR (Case Study Reports) and CHASE (Challenges and Achievements in Software Engineering) tracks.  The case studies will report on experiences in both academic and industrial settings, and the CHASE sessions will deal explicitly with academic and industrial perspectives and their interaction.
Recurring themes in the IIP sessions were time-to-market, cost, time performance, capacity performance, usability, and organizational context.  Gene Hoffnagle, the chair of the component technologies IIP, maintains that these themes exemplify the difference in focus between industry and academia.  “In a sense, we have a ‘two cultures’ issue here,” Hoffnagle asserts.  “The practitioner is looking for something that can be used, something that is done.  The researcher is looking for something that can be studied, something that is not done.  As a result, some come to conferences like this looking for the doughnut; others come looking for the hole.”  Expanding on this point, Hoffnagle states, “Researchers examine the world of the possible; practitioners are interested in what is usable.  Sometimes what is possible becomes something usable—the hole gets filled in with doughnut, as it were—but sometimes nothing usable comes out of a research effort, or something too narrow to be useful.  Sometimes the result seems usable to researchers but not to practitioners; software development formalisms are an example of this, which have many practitioners politely puzzled about what to do with them.”
What do you think?  Go to the sessions on Thursday and make up your own mind.  Then give us an earful—WOW wants to know!
— John M. Linebarger