Is Cutting-Edge Software Engineering Attractive for Developers in SMEs?

To set the goal of software engineering research, we should aware needs of the majority of developers. In Japan, the majority is developers who belong to companies where number of employees is smaller than 300. However, it is not clear to what extent cutting-edge software engineering satisfies the needs of the majority. So, we analyzed whether cutting-edge software engineering satisfies the needs of developers who belong to small and medium-sized enterprises, or not. We asked 16 software developers who belong to software development companies about effectiveness of cutting-edge researches to their work. In the analysis, we stratified data based on the size of their company. The analysis results suggested that when size of companies to which subjects belong was different, research categories related to subjects' work were also different. However, sizes of companies did not affect evaluation to the effectiveness and the interests of the researches. Additionally, we predicted categories of researches which relate to each developer's business (i.e., discrimination), and the evaluation of developers (evaluated by five grades) to each research, using collaborative filtering. As a result, when we predicted research categories which related to subjects' work, the accuracy was low (F1 score was 27%). In contrast, when we predicted the interestingness to the researches, the accuracy was moderate (Average of absolute error was 1.16).