I think other fields that recognize continuing professional development as a need also tend to have guild/licensing requirements (lawyers have the bar, doctors have their boards, electricians and plumbers and mechanical and civil engineers have government-run licensing requirements), and so the same bodies that handle the original certification to practice also serve as leaders for the communities of practice and for continuing-education knowledge dissemination. It seems to me like The Volokh Conspiracy coexists in a kind of symbiosis with the formal legal scholarship and Continuing Legal Education practices, and arXiv coexists in a symbiosis with formal academic publishing, research, and teaching. Since (at least in the US) there is no licensing/certification requirement to work as a software engineer, and so there's no continuing ed requirement, I think that reduces the hunger for thorough and systematic "here's new research stuff you need to know" infrastructure, which means we get our information from gossip and fashion mags and so on. And of course there are other factors, as Greg Wilson discusses.
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Date: 2015-06-03 02:08 pm (UTC)http://neverworkintheory.org/ (a blog pointing to recent software engineering research you can use) and Greg Wilson's research curation work in general strike me as good -- you might be interested in his and Jorge Aranda's "reasons people in industry and academia don't talk to each other as much as they should", his "It's Not Theory vs. Practice, It's Two Solitudes" and his talk "Two Solitudes" with a proposal for fixing the problem.
Sarah Mei's list of factors why "Academic research on software engineering has been a decade behind current practice since I've been practicing" may also interest you.
I think other fields that recognize continuing professional development as a need also tend to have guild/licensing requirements (lawyers have the bar, doctors have their boards, electricians and plumbers and mechanical and civil engineers have government-run licensing requirements), and so the same bodies that handle the original certification to practice also serve as leaders for the communities of practice and for continuing-education knowledge dissemination. It seems to me like The Volokh Conspiracy coexists in a kind of symbiosis with the formal legal scholarship and Continuing Legal Education practices, and arXiv coexists in a symbiosis with formal academic publishing, research, and teaching. Since (at least in the US) there is no licensing/certification requirement to work as a software engineer, and so there's no continuing ed requirement, I think that reduces the hunger for thorough and systematic "here's new research stuff you need to know" infrastructure, which means we get our information from gossip and fashion mags and so on. And of course there are other factors, as Greg Wilson discusses.