Are you getting traction? tales from the tech transfer trenches (invited talk)

Abstract

So you have developed a new software productivity tool, written an FSE or an ICSE paper about it, and are justifiably proud of your work. If you work for a company, your (curmudgeonly) manager now wants to see its “impact” on the business. This is the part where you have to convince someone else to use your shiny new tool in their day-to-day work, or ship it as a product. But you soon realize that getting traction with developers or product managers is significantly harder than the research itself. Sounds familiar? In the past several years, I have been involved in taking a variety of software productivity tools to various constituencies within a company: internal users, product teams, and service delivery teams. In this talk, I will share my experiences in interacting with these constituencies; sometimes successful experiences, but at other times not so successful ones. I will focus broadly on tools in two areas: bug finding and test automation. I will make some observations on when tech transfer works and when it stumbles.