Lean Research Inception (LRI) is a collaborative framework that helps researchers and practitioners jointly formulate and assess research problems with real-world relevance in Software Engineering.
Inspired by agile methods like Design Thinking, Lean Startup, and Lean Inception, LRI seeks to promote early integration between academia and industry. It combines a visual tool — the Problem Vision Board — with a assessment scale based on value, feasibility, and applicability, drawing from the concept of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
This board includes:
• An example based on a real-world problem to illustrate how LRI works
• A blank template to support workshops, research planning, or co-creation sessions
The approach is part of the Ph.D. research of Anrafel Fernandes Pereira at PUC-Rio (Brazil). It has been refined through studies at the ExACTa Lab and in a workshop with senior researchers during International Software Engineering Research Network - ISERN 2024.
LRI is recommended for research groups, industry-academia collaboration projects, and anyone aiming to align scientific research with industry needs.
A research paper describing LRI was published in International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) 2025 and is available as a preprint on arXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12669
