This book is a collection of 15 papers chosen from 43 delivered at the KKIO Software Engineering Conference in Poland in 2016. The authors of the papers had the opportunity to revise their work prior to publication in this compendium, which is Volume 733 of the Springer series “Studies in Computational Intelligence.”

The papers, presented as chapters within the book, are broad in their coverage of software engineering. The editors assert that the chapters (each about 15 pages in length) are loosely grouped into four categories: languages and tools for software development (seven papers), software development processes (four papers), modeling and verification (three papers), and education in software education (one paper). However, there is little connection between each paper, and even the broad categories offer little to unify the papers into a coherent collection. The papers are, in and of themselves, well written and valuable, but none seem to fully embrace the title of the volume and offer a viewpoint providing an overview of a synergistic relationship between research and practice. Each paper is authored and presented as a typical conference paper delivering its findings. These findings are often determined from an experiment conducted in a university lab, or observations from a student project. Claims are then made about the applicability of the results and an inference is made that the results are applicable and helpful to industry without any industry feedback or evaluation of the tool or methodology being offered.

The collection is mostly aimed at an academic audience. Even though the papers address real issues of interest to industry in general, they lack industry involvement or feedback, and do not demonstrate scalability so as to be useful in an industrial setting. I feel a collection of papers sourced from many conferences, but united by a common topic or theme, would have been more valuable and had a greater chance to live up to the promises made by the title of this volume.

Two noteworthy papers in this book include “Ensuring the Strong Exception Safety” by Piotr Kosiuczenko and “Efficient Testing of Time-Dependent, Asynchronous Code” by Tomasz Lewowski. Both present interesting academic results that have the potential for significant impact in an industrial setting, but neither discusses a complete, efficient implementation that could be used in an industrial context. The first paper presents a prototype to rollback method invocation in the presence of failures in a manner analogous to transaction rollback in a database environment. However, the performance impact of the prototype is such that there is a five-fold increase in memory utilization and a slowdown in performance by a factor of 7.5. The second focuses on testing time-sensitive asynchronous code and discusses issues with common approaches to testing such code. The model, aimed at maximum test reproducibility and not maximum flexibility, has been used by 100 developers at Nokia, and the claim is made that the system was helpful and bug-free, but no data are presented.