Bridging the Gap: SE technology transfer into practice

Background: Particularly during and after research projects, technology transfer into practice plays an important role for academia to get technologies into use and for industry to improve their development. Objective: Our goal was to gain more and current knowledge about how technology transfer from software engineering (SE) research into industrial practice is accomplished best and how to measure the effectiveness of this transfer. Method: We conducted a study in the context of two German research projects, covering many different organizations from industry and academia. Results: This paper presents the design of the study and the survey performed. After introducing the concept of technology transfer we used and adapted, we present preliminary results. Conclusions: We observed that traditional means such as meetings or workshops are still the most widely used mediums for technology transfer in SE. We also discovered that, even though the duration of transfer depends on the object being transferred, the average duration is three years, which is far less than previously published (~18 years).