The Top 10 Burning Research Questions from Practitioners

A common and frequent complaint from software practitioners is that academic research doesn't meet their requirements or expectations. During XP 2010 in Trondheim this year, practitioners were asked to suggest research topics that they'd like to see addressed. Around 60 different suggestions were made. They were collected and displayed so that attendees at the conference could vote for their favorite topic, and from this we developed a prioritized backlog of research issues. This article presents the top ten issues according to the voting, discusses the range of themes across the complete set of suggestions, and poses several questions that need answering for this backlog to be processed. The Web extra is an erratum to the acknowledgments.