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Collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. However, many researchers and practitioners believe that the level of joint industry-academia collaborations (IAC) in software engineering (SE) is still relatively very low, compared to the amount of activity in each of the two communities. The goal of the empirical study reported in this paper is to characterize a set of collaborative industry-academia R&D projects in the area of software testing conducted by the authors (based in Canada and Turkey) with respect to a set of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns identified by a recent Systematic Literature Review (SLR) study, with the aim of contributing to the body of evidence in the area of IAC, for the benefit of SE researchers and practitioners in conducting successful IAC projects in software testing and in software engineering in general. To address the above goal, a pool of 10 IAC projects (6 completed, 2 failed and 2 ongoing) all in the area of software testing, which the authors have led or have had an active roles in, were selected as objects of study and were analyzed (both quantitatively and qualitatively) w.r.t. the set of selected challenges, patterns and anti-patterns. As outputs, the study presents a set of empirical findings and evidence-based recommendations, e.g.: it has been observed that even if an IAC project may seem perfect from many aspects, but one single major challenge (e.g., disagreement in confidentiality agreements) can lead to its failure. Thus, we recommend that both parties (academics and practitioners) consider all the challenges early on and proactively work together to eliminate the risk of challenges in IAC projects. We furthermore report correlation and interrelationship of challenges, patterns and anti-patterns with project success measures. This study hopes to encourage and benefit other SE researchers and practitioners in conducting successful IAC projects in software testing and in software engineering in general in the future.

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ContextSoftware testing is an important and costly software engineering activity in the industry. Despite the efforts of the software testing research community in the last several decades, various studies show that still many practitioners in the industry report challenges in their software testing tasks.ObjectiveTo shed light on industry's challenges in software testing, we characterize and synthesize the challenges reported by practitioners. Such concrete challenges can then be used for a variety of purposes, eg, research collaborations between industry and academia.MethodOur empirical research method is opinion survey. By designing an online survey, we solicited practitioners' opinions about their challenges in different testing activities. Our dataset includes data from 72 practitioners from eight different countries.ResultsOur results show that test management and test automation are considered the most challenging among all testing activities by practitioners. Our results also include a set of 104 concrete challenges in software testing that may need further investigations by the research community.ConclusionWe conclude that the focal points of industrial work and academic research in software testing differ. Furthermore, the paper at hand provides valuable insights concerning practitioners' “pain” points and, thus, provides researchers with a source of important research topics of high practical relevance.

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