Supporting Technology Transfer by Providing Recommendations for Writing Structured Guidelines

It takes between 15 and 20 years to achieve widespread implementation of recent technologies from research to practice. Guidelines have shown to be an adequate method for efficiently transferring technology into an industrial context, especially in software engineering. However, recommendations for writing guidelines are still fuzzy w.r.t. content and structure, i.e., existing approaches do not give comprehensive recommendations on how to write meaningful guidelines. In this paper, we propose recommendations for writing guidelines. These recommendations include a reference structure that supports the author in writing guidelines by providing guiding questions for each chapter of a guideline. The recommendations are based on requirements that were elicited from leading companies in different industry domains. It was initially evaluated in a prototypical guideline instantiation by one of our industry partners.