Software engineering (SE) research should be relevant to industrial practice. There have been regular discussions in the SE community on this issue since the 1980’s, led by pioneers such as Robert Glass. As we recently passed the milestone of “50 years of software engineering”, some recent positive efforts have been made in this direction, e.g., establishing “industrial” tracks in several SE conferences. However, many researchers and practitioners believe that we, as a community, are still struggling with research relevance and utility. The goal of this paper is to synthesize the evidence and experience-based opinions shared on this topic so far in the SE community, and to encourage the community to further reflect and act on the research relevance. For this purpose, we have conducted a Multi-vocal Literature Review (MLR) of 54 systematically-selected sources (papers and non peer-reviewed articles). Instead of relying on and considering the individual opinions on research relevance, mentioned in each of the sources, the MLR aims to synthesize and provide the “holistic” view on the topic. The highlights of our MLR findings are as follows. The top three root causes of low relevance, discussed in the community, are: (1) Researchers having simplistic views (or wrong assumptions) about SE in practice; (2) Lack of connection with industry; and (3) Wrong identification of research problems. The top three suggestions for improving research relevance are: (1) Using appropriate research approaches such as action-research; (2) Choosing relevant (practical) research problems; and (3) Collaborating with industry. By synthesizing all the discussions on this important topic so far, this paper aims to encourage further discussions and actions in the community to increase our collective efforts to improve the research relevance. Furthermore, we raise the need for empirically-grounded and rigorous studies on the relevance problem in SE research, as carried out in other fields such as management science.

中文翻译：

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软件工程研究的实际相关性：综合社区的声音

软件工程 (SE) 研究应该与工业实践相关。自 1980 年代以来，SE 社区就这个问题进行了定期讨论，由 Robert Glass 等先驱领导。随着我们最近通过了“软件工程 50 年”的里程碑，最近在这个方向上做出了一些积极的努力，例如在几个 SE 会议中建立了“工业”轨道。然而，许多研究人员和从业者认为，作为一个社区，我们仍在为研究的相关性和实用性而苦苦挣扎。本文的目标是综合迄今为止在 SE 社区中就该主题共享的证据和基于经验的意见，并鼓励社区进一步反思研究相关性并采取行动。以此目的，我们对 54 个系统选择的来源（论文和非同行评审文章）进行了多声文献综述 (MLR)。MLR 不是依赖和考虑每个来源中提到的关于研究相关性的个人意见，而是旨在综合并提供关于该主题的“整体”观点。我们的 MLR 调查结果的亮点如下。社区中讨论的前三个相关性低的根本原因是： (1) 研究人员在实践中对 SE 的看法过于简单（或错误的假设）；（二）与行业缺乏联系；（3）对研究问题的错误识别。提高研究相关性的前三项建议是： (1) 使用适当的研究方法，例如行动研究；(2) 选择相关的（实际的）研究问题；(3) 与产业合作。通过综合迄今为止关于这一重要主题的所有讨论，本文旨在鼓励社区中进一步的讨论和行动，以增加我们提高研究相关性的集体努力。此外，我们提出需要对 SE 研究中的相关问题进行以实证为基础的严格研究，就像在管理科学等其他领域进行的那样。