There is a lot of research done in this and other areas of Software Engineering. Problem is that it's usually locked away behind a huge paywall. If you're not affiliated with some university, you essentially have no access to it.
This may be true for research in other domains but as a researcher in Computer Science I can assure you that the number of academic papers locked behind a paywall is negligible in CS. Only once was did I find a paper not available and I promptly received a copy by sending an e-mail to the authors of the paper.
Like I said earlier areas like computational Medicine, Biology and other such areas run into pay walls. CS research areas like theory, data mining, NLP etc. will rarely run into such problems.