Culture conflicts in software engineering technology transfer

Although the need to transition new technology to improve the process of developing quality software products is well understood, the computer software industry has done a poor job of carrying out that need. All too often new software technology is touted as the next "silver bullet" to be adopted, only to fail and disappear within a very short period. New technologies are often adopted without any convincing evidence that they will be effective, yet other technologies are ignored despite the published data that they will be useful. It is cClearly there is a clash between those developing new technologies and those responsible for developing quality products. In this paper we discuss a study conducted among a large group of computer software professionals in order to understand what techniques can be used to support the introduction of new technologies, and to understand the biases and opinions of those charged with researching, developing or implementing those new technologies. This study indicates which evaluation techniques are viewed as most successful under various conditions. We show that the research and industrial communities do indeed have different perspectives, which leads to a clash between the goals of the technology developers researchers and the needs of the technology users.