Spiral Approach for SE Research (SASER): mating research to practice

Systems Engineering research findings often fail to be adopted by industry, despite using a thorough and rigorous research methodology like the Design Research Methodology (DRM). Industry as Laboratory is a research approach that improves relevance for industry by embedding parts of the research in real industry settings. A drawback is that experimenting in industry is done after extensive and time consuming analysis, leading to lost interest by the company. Further the extensive analysis phase described in the DRM can result in analysis lock-in for the researcher. The Spiral Approach for Systems Engineering Research (SASER) introduced here increases the rate of experimenting in industry by mating the established spiral development approach with rigorous design research as defined in the DRM. This way, the company can see and adopt findings earlier, and the researcher can see the results sooner. The expectation is that not only the company remains interested, but also the researcher stays motivated and avoids the analysis lock-in. The paper presents SASER and illustrates it with a descriptive example.