Improve the Practice of Software Development in India by Having a Software Development Career Track in Indian CS&IT Academia

Many, but not all, Indian CS & IT academics tend to have a focus on theory and research. They do not give much importance to the practice of software development. This paper proposes an additional software development career track for Indian CS & IT academics different from the existing research oriented career track. A measure of software contribution record is suggested. It opines that adoption of such changes to academic regulations will result in significant improvement of software development skill set in Indian CS & IT academia which, in turn, will result in better software development skill set in Indian CS & IT graduates. Note: The review remarks for this article by a noted international academic publication focused on CS education and the response of the author are provided in Appendix A.