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Technology transfer decision support in requirements engineering research: a systematic review of REj

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Abstract

One of the main goals of an applied research field such as requirements engineering is the transfer of research results to industrial use. To promote industrial adoption of technologies developed in academia, researchers need to provide tangible evidence of the advantages of using them. This can be done through industry validation, enabling researchers to test and validate technologies in a real setting with real users and applications. The evidence obtained, together with detailed information on how the validation was conducted, offers rich decision support material for industrial practitioners seeking to adopt new technologies. This paper presents a comprehensive systematic literature review of all papers published in the Requirements Engineering journal containing any type of technology evaluation. The aim is to gauge the support for technology transfer, i.e., to what degree industrial practitioners can use the reporting of technology evaluations in the journal as decision support for adopting the technologies in industrial practice. Findings show that very few evaluations offer full technology transfer support, i.e., have a realistic scale, application or subjects. The major improvement potential concerning support for technology transfer is found to be the subjects used in the evaluations. Attaining company support, including support for using practitioners as subjects, is vital for technology transfer and for researchers seeking to validate technologies.

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Notes

  1. The search was carried out on June 23 2008 and two of the articles were published as online first articles. Inspec indexed articles from issue 1:1 up until issue 12:2. The rest of the issues were searched manually.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412 96, Göteborg, Sweden

    Martin Ivarsson

  2. School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby, Sweden

    Tony Gorschek

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  1. Martin Ivarsson
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  2. Tony Gorschek
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Correspondence to Martin Ivarsson.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 16 Technologies identified in the review
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Ivarsson, M., Gorschek, T. Technology transfer decision support in requirements engineering research: a systematic review of REj. Requirements Eng 14, 155–175 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-009-0080-1

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