Abstract
Runtime verification, with its practical applicability and myriad of theoretical challenges it still poses, has the potential to bridge the gap between academic research in the field of formal methods with the software industry. In order to facilitate this, it is useful to extrapolate success patterns from previous projects: Are certain characteristics of an industry-academia project a determining factor in the project’s success? How can runtime verification design decisions take into considerations project characteristics to improve the chances of success?
This paper attempts to shed some light on these questions by reflecting on five projects with two partners over the past ten years. A number of lessons emerge, perhaps the most poignant one being the need to think long term in setting mutually beneficial goals from which a strong working relationship can emerge.
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- 1.
While it would have been preferable to include a wider set of projects in our analysis (including those from other research groups), we found that reporting of the “post-mortem” of such projects is sparse in the literature. Many of the observations we make in this paper are on the non-scientific aspects of the research projects (e.g. whether participation of the industrial partner in the project had an impact on the way they approached validation and verification of other systems they were developing), which are typically not discussed in scientific reports of the outcome of such projects. Therefore, while we are aware of several projects which have applied academic techniques in an industrial setting, we cannot include these in this paper due to the lack of information of what happened after the end of the project.
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Sometimes referred to as the observer effect, the Hawthorne effect is the phenomenon that when aware of being observed, individuals may modify aspects of their behaviour.
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Names of the industrial partners are left out due to information sensitivity and in order to allow us to be able to discuss project success or otherwise more freely.
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Colombo, C., Pace, G.J. (2018). Considering Academia-Industry Projects Meta-characteristics in Runtime Verification Design. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Industrial Practice. ISoLA 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11247. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03427-6_5
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