A Catalog of Process Patterns for Academic Software Projects

Universities have established partnerships with industry or government through technological innovation projects to develop solutions based on problems presented by institutions. Based on a systematic literature review, we identified a lack of software processes suitable for projects developed in academia. This article proposes a catalogue of process patterns documenting practices that have been successfully adopted in academic projects involving external partnerships. Process patterns describe solutions to problems and challenges commonly found in projects developed in the university environment. We conduct a systematic literature review to identify problems commonly encountered in academic projects and the software practices applied to solve them. Later, with the help of the literature, we deepened the understanding of how the software practices can be used in software projects and documented them as process patterns. As a result, we have identified thirteen problems and documented ten process patterns describing possible solutions related to the problem. Eight researchers with experience in software projects in partnership with academia participated in the validation. The validation showed that the proposed process pattern catalogue describes relevant solutions to the problems and is applicable to the academic context.