Impact Beyond Partcipation
The many benefits of CSER extend beyond the participating universities
and companies to the research community and Canadian software industry
at large. The benefits of the Consortium’s efforts are threefold.
Industry
benefits from the focus of intellectual resources on some of their relevant
problems. Academics will choose to experiment on any
number of areas and CSER helps focus some of that research on problems
of interest. More importantly, the companies believe that the chronic
shortage of highly qualified personnel possessing the appropriate knowledge
of practical software engineering skills can only be addressed by providing
academic researchers with exposure to industrial research. This not only
refers to the graduate students, who are directly involved in tackling
the company’s
problems, but also undergraduate students who benefit from the subtler
effects of changes in course content, examples and assignments reflecting
professors’ increased understanding of current industrial perspectives
and practices.
The benefit to university investigators and their students,
beyond the availability of research funding, is the opportunity to work
with industrial researchers on problems of practical importance. This
helps academic researchers to gain an appreciation of the issues that
truly affect industrial research and influence the evaluation of proposed
solutions. As well, access to a corpus of “industrial strength” software,
and to historical data and experience with deployed products, provides
a research environment impossible to duplicate in a university environment.
The ability for research results to have immediate impact on a large
base of users provides an industrial form of technology transfer that
is more effective, and more satisfying, than the usual academic route
through publication. One of the great
benefits of CSER for the students is that they are exposed to the research
perspectives of several principal investigators instead of just their supervisors.
The principal investigators also really appreciate the immediate feedback
from other CSER PIs on their research results.
One particular advantage to industry participation is the availability
of appropriate test scenarios. Solutions that are feasible and practical
on 1000-line sample programs or even 100,000 line test scenarios have proven
to be ineffective on the types of problems typically found in commercial
software systems. By partnering with industry, academics can have access
to large, realistic, complex, and still evolving software systems.
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Creating Synergy Between Industry and Academia
A major
benefit to all the participants in CSER, both industrial and academic,
is the creation of synergy between multi-company and multi-university research
teams with different viewpoints, attacking several aspects of common problems. “Pre-competitive
research” has been a popular buzzword in recent years. Because CSER
research focuses on the processes, by which products are built and supported,
and not on the products themselves, companies can collaborate on this kind
of research not just in the pre-competitive stage, but even while products
are being marketed. Process improvements make companies more competitive
through higher productivity, reduced time-to-market, better quality, more
accurate prediction for planning, and reduced unit costs from wider markets
and longer lifetimes. Because research results do not induce competition
with respect to products, companies can be more open about collaborating
with each other and with academia. Results can often be disclosed openly
to the general public without losing the competitive advantage gained by
the participants in the research. Applying the derived tools and techniques
in the context of a specific company is significantly more difficult for
any company not directly involved in the research. After six years, this
is not a theoretical benefit but has been proven, repeatedly, and represents
one of the most valued and respected features of CSER.
A key aspect of CSER’s
research policy is that the work must be done, at least in part, on site
at the company. This facilitates access to company resources and to proprietary
corporate information, as well as exposes the academic researchers to the
cultural issues of industrial research. Nevertheless, some of the research
is done off site, both at the universities and at NRC. This is particularly
important for ensuring interchange and synergy among CSER projects. NRC
staff is currently involved in CSER and will continue to be involved as
researchers in some of the projects to a much greater extent than in the
past.
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Highly-Qualified Graduate
Students for the
Canadian Software Industry
CSER also benefits the Canadian software industry at large through
direct or indirect contributions to software engineering degree programs
and options and more relevant and improved software engineering course
materials and teaching at Canadian universities. The most immediate impact
of CSER is an increase in the number of graduate students with exposure
to industrial research activities entering the Canadian hi-tech work
force. Over the long term others will be taught courses based on the experiences
of the professors gained during research work.
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Benefits At-A-Glance
In Summary the benefits are:
- a direction of research activity to themes that are more
clearly focused on problems relevant to the software industry and to
those industries that rely on software as a source of competitive advantage;
- improved techniques for software development, evolution and
maintenance resulting in greater software productivity and better software
quality;
- an increase in the impact of university research on the new
products and services that Canadian firms will offer in the 3 to
5 year time frame, through research emphasis on applications and industrial
scale problems;
- an increase in the number of university graduates with expertise
in software engineering practice that can be hired to meet industry
needs;
- stronger linkages between industry personnel and university
based researchers located in Canada and abroad and an increase in
university resources with expertise in software engineering;
- an increase in the capability of software professionals to address
complex problems in software engineering and keep abreast of changes
in software technology.
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