Software Analytics to Software Practice: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Software Analytics (SA) is a new branch of big data analytics that has recently emerged (2011). What distinguishes SA from direct software analysis is that it links data mined from many different software artifacts to obtain valuable insights. These insights are useful for the decision-making process throughout the different phases of the software lifecycle. Since SA is currently a hot and promising topic, we have conducted a systematic literature review, presented in this paper, to identify gaps in knowledge and open research areas in SA. Because many researchers are still confused about the true potential of SA, we had to filter out available research papers to obtain the most SArelevant work for our review. This filtration yielded 19 studies out of 135. We have based our systematic review on four main factors: which software practitioners SA targets, which domains are covered by SA, which artifacts are extracted by SA, and whether these artifacts are linked or not. The results of our review have shown that much of the available SA research only serves the needs of developers. Also, much of the available research uses only one artifact which, in turn, means fewer links between artifacts and fewer insights. This shows that the available SA research work is still embryonic leaving plenty of room for future research in the SA field.Index Terms-Software analytics, software development analytics, systematic literature review, big data analytics. 2015 IEEE/ACM 1st International Workshop on Big Data Software Engineering 978-1-4673-7025-7/15 $31.00

Software Development Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance Checking and Enhancement

“…Software development became a fundamental process on any business or organization, therefore, it is vital to carefully study, understand, and improve it [72]. It is surprising though, that so many studies around the software development process, end up using, as a data source, data/metrics not about the activities, tasks, or actions taken by the developers along the way, but instead, about the outcome: the product [1]. Moreover, when those studies use process metrics, they are based on inputs from management tools like Software Configuration Management (SCM) or Bug/Issue Tracking Tools (BTT), meaning, they are based on what the developers said they have done, and not on irrefutable evidence of what (and how) they actually did.…”

“…Since then, a vast amount of literature was produced presenting stakeholders with new ways of improving the efficiency and effectiveness in developing software products by providing insights to streamline the processes or to optimize resource allocation [1].…”

“…The SDA research field was proposed by Thomas Zimmermann and his colleagues from the Empirical Software Engineering Group ESE at Microsoft Research Redmond MSRR [34]. Since then, a vast amount of literature was produced presenting stakeholders with new ways of improving the efficiency and effectiveness in developing software products, by providing insights on how to streamline the processes or to optimize resource allocation [1].…”

“…-Albert Einstein(1879-1955) 1 It was a long journey, longer than anything I could have initially aspired or even predicted.…”

“…Even if the obstacles are significant and relevant outcomes may look distant, one should never be afraid of challenges or continuous change, as both cases, at least to me, make me somehow believe there is always a bright future ahead. "...All things -from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy-are, in reality, not things at all, but processes..." 1 -Alvin Toffler(1928-2016) 2…”