Fifteen Years of Industry and Academia Partnership: Lessons Learned from a Brazilian Research Group

In Brazil, software industry and academia have formed partnerships more often due to funding agencies and tax incentives originated, for example, from Brazil's Informatics Law. Like in many relationships, each party brings different experiences, and goals to be achieved. However, for a partnership to be successful, it is necessary to learn how to deal with these differences, respecting the limits of each party and fostering mutual growth. The aim of this paper is to present challenges and lessons learned faced by the GREat research group at the Federal University of Cear × over the past 15 years of partnership with industry. Besides, we present the GREat Business process for projects with industry and how the software engineering evolved in our group within these projects. We believe this report can help other industry and academic partnerships around the world not only because our main partners are international companies but also because what we have learned from practice is globally applied.