Industry and Academia Partnership for Short-time High-level Qualification

This Innovate Practice Full Paper reports a Industry/Academia partnership to improve the qualification of both students and professionals. Consider the following scenario: a city located in a third world country, with one of the lowest countrywide educational performances, hosting an industrial pole based on Federal tax incentives aiming to develop a R&D cluster. The city has basic services issues, from health to urban violence, making the attraction of professionals from other locations unfeasible. As a consequence, the lack of professionals with R&D profile is now considered a relevant risk to the continuation of the city’s industrial policies. Therefore, initiatives that shorten the qualification life-cycle of local professionals, while preparing senior students with real-world experience, are welcome. An example of such initiative, reported in this paper, was the software test residence, formed by professionals from the industry, and senior undergraduate and graduate students of a local university. The proposal consisted on defining a set of learning activities where students and professionals would be partners, but still being aware that they belong to different realities (with respect to timing, accountability and accreditation). The challenge can be summarized as follows: how to jointly qualify students and professionals, while respecting the peculiarities of both audiences. In order to address the issue in a short time period, representatives from a global company with R&D site in the city partnered with a local university to define a learning program inspired by the software residence approach. The university’s course syllabus in Software Test was reviewed and customized to the on-the-job training subject of interest. Moreover, the approach was based on three nonnegotiable principles: Accountability, Excellence and Sustainability. The experience was successful, reaching 25 participants from four R&D organizations and the university. Results obtained include qualification of 23 participants (only two dropped off), the development of an open source educational material composed by a set of slides for testing automation classes, theory-practice of software testing targeting Test Maturity Model integration (TMMi) level 2, and the improvement in the collaboration between academia and industry for other projects. The paper will detail the experience, and list some lessons learned, including how to synchronize the schedules.