Lack of applicability and adoption of RE research into industrial practice has been a topic of discussion
and, in fact, a topic of research in itself, for the last decade. The reasons for gaps between research and
industrial practice are multifold. On the one hand, there is a prevalent perception that researchers select
topics that are transformative in nature and address the future, while industry practitioners need to focus
on solving more immediate practical problems. On the other hand, the industrial practitioners are
skeptical about the typical examples used in academic research, such as library management and ATM,
since they do not sufficiently represent the complexities of real-life project settings. Experiments executed
within an academic setting are well constructed, but highly resource-constrained. Moreover, the use of
students as test subjects raises questions about the validity of the results for industrial settings. Industries
are reluctant to share data due to confidentiality agreements they must respect.

How do we get past these fundamental issues? We believe that we are at a stage where both communities
need to explore ways to leverage each other’s strengths. We need a virtuous cycle of taking preliminary
research results to field as well as identifying interesting practical problems that can only be detected by
working on field, investigating the problems to identify unanswered research questions, conducting a
more informed research and taking the mature results to field again. This can happen only if researchers
and practitioners brainstorm prevalent issues with respect to the gaps in research and practice and
collaborate to solve challenging problems.