Having seen both sides, I would argue that academia doesn't really have a subfield that fits distributed systems well (most industry systems span multiple acade

Having seen both sides, I would argue that academia doesn't really have a subfield that fits distributed systems well (most industry systems span multiple academic fields, from networking to fault tolerance, databases, OS, etc). Not to say that people don't research it, but more people research subcomponents. Also, I would argue that academia is about 7 years behind industry in this area, and so papers don't match up to reality well. On the other side, industry testing is usually very specific to the internal product created, and so there is an incentive not to publish anything. There is some nice academic research outside of CS, notably mechanical engineering, on systems testing. It is pretty applicable. Contracts, sub-unit testing, etc are all anaolgous. My two cents.