Industrial and Academic Software Product Line Research at SPLC: Perceptions of the Community

We present preliminary insights into the perception of researchers and practitioners of the software product line (SPL) community on previous, current, and future research efforts. We were particularly interested in up-and-coming and outdated topics and whether the views of academics and industry researchers differ. Also, we compared the views of the community with the results of an earlier literature survey published at SPLC 2018. We conducted a questionnaire-based survey with attendees of SPLC 2018. We received 33 responses (about a third of the attendees) from both, very experienced attendees and younger researchers, and from academics as well as industry researchers. We report preliminary findings regarding popular and unpopular SPL topics, topics requiring further work, and industry versus academic researchers' views. Differences between academic and industry researchers become visible only when analyzing comments on open questions. Most importantly, while topics popular among respondents are also popular in the literature, topics respondents think require further work have often already been well researched. We conclude that the SPL community needs to do a better job preserving and communicating existing knowledge and particularly also needs to widen its scope.