Journals Proceedings

Abstract

Achieving excellence in software development techniques is an important issue for the organizations that develop advanced software-intensive products. Within this context, software excellence is defined as the adoption of advanced software techniques and methods to cope with the complexity and the needs of modern software systems. However, this is not trivial due to the rapidly changing software technology, continuously increasing existence of large and complex software systems and difficulty in following the developments of the stateof- the-art in computer science. This paper focuses on the last aspect. To overcome this problem, it is necessary to define new ways for efficient university-software industry cooperation since advancements in computer science are largely carried out by universities. The existing university-industry cooperation methods are usually triggered after writing grant proposals to financing organizations and passing through strict selection processes. This is, in general, a very inefficient and tedious process to undertake. Even in a perfect review process, many good ideas may not go through simply because they do not fulfill the necessary procedural requirements. Moreover, industrial people may not be familiar with the methods and jargon used in the selection processes. Even if a project is approved, many times it does not result in a technology transfer to industry since accomplishing academic results is the main objective of such projects. This paper presents an overview of a pilot implementation of our approach termed as “Describe, Search and Acquire the Required Capability” (DESARC), which aims at establishing a more effective identification of research projects, allocation of these research projects to research groups and the cooperation between universities and industry. We discuss the results of the application of the method to two large IT companies in Turkey