Gap between academia and industry: a case of empirical evaluation of three software testing methods

Doing the right kind of testing has always been one of main challenging and a decisive task for industry. To choose right software testing method(s), industry needs to have an exact objective knowledge of their effectiveness, efficiency, and applicability conditions. The most common way to evaluate testing methods, for such knowledge, is with empirical studies. Reliable and comprehensive evidence can be obtained by aggregating the results of different empirical studies (family of experiments) taking into account their findings and limitations. We conducted a study to investigate the current state of the art of empirical knowledge base of three testing methods. We found that although the empirical studies conducted so far to evaluate testing methods contain many important and interesting results; however, we still lack factual and generalizable knowledge about performance and applicability conditions of testing methods(s), making it unfeasible to be readily adopted by the industry. Moreover, we tried to identify the major factors responsible for limiting academia from producing significantly reliable results having an industrial impact. We believe that besides effective and long-term academia-industry collaboration, there is a need for more systematic, quantifiable and comprehensive empirical studies (which provides scope for aggregation using rigorous techniques), mainly replications so as to create an effective and applicable knowledge base about testing methods which potentially can fill the gap between academia and industry.