A Quality Model for Actionable Analytics in Rapid Software Development

Background: Accessing relevant data on the product, process, and usage perspectives of software as well as integrating and analyzing such data is crucial for getting reliable and timely actionable insights aimed at continuously managing software quality in Rapid Software Development (RSD). In this context, several software analytics tools have been developed in recent years. However, there is a lack of explainable software analytics that software practitioners trust. Aims: We aimed at creating a quality model (called Q-Rapids quality model) for actionable analytics in RSD, implementing it, and evaluating its understandability and relevance. Method: We performed workshops at four companies in order to determine relevant metrics as well as product and process factors. We also elicited how these metrics and factors are used and interpreted by practitioners when making decisions in RSD. We specified the Q-Rapids quality model by comparing and integrating the results of the four workshops. Then we implemented the Q-Rapids tool to support the usage of the Q-Rapids quality model as well as the gathering, integration, and analysis of the required data. Afterwards we installed the Q-Rapids tool in the four companies and performed semi-structured interviews with eight product owners to evaluate the understandability and relevance of the Q-Rapids quality model. Results: The participants of the evaluation perceived the metrics as well as the product and process factors of the Q-Rapids quality model as understandable. Also, they considered the Q-Rapids quality model relevant for identifying product and process deficiencies (e.g., blocking code situations). Conclusions: By means of heterogeneous data sources, the Q-Rapids quality model enables detecting problems that take more time to find manually and adds transparency among the perspectives of system, process, and usage.Comment: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of a paper to be published by IEEE in the 44th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA) 2018. The final authenticated version will be available onlin

A quality model for actionable analytics in rapid software development

Accessing relevant data on the product, process, and usage perspectives of software as well as integrating and analyzing such data is crucial for getting reliable and timely actionable insights aimed at continuously managing software quality in Rapid Software Development (RSD). In this context, several software analytics tools have been developed in recent years. However, there is a lack of explainable software analytics that software practitioners trust. Aims: We aimed at creating a quality model (called Q-Rapids quality model) for actionable analytics in RSD, implementing it, and evaluating its understandability and relevance. Method: We performed workshops at four companies in order to determine relevant metrics as well as product and process factors. We also elicited how these metrics and factors are used and interpreted by practitioners when making decisions in RSD. We specified the Q-Rapids quality model by comparing and integrating the results of the four workshops. Then we implemented the Q-Rapids tool to support the usage of the Q-Rapids quality model as well as the gathering, integration, and analysis of the required data. Afterwards we installed the Q-Rapids tool in the four companies and performed semi-structured interviews with eight product owners to evaluate the understandability and relevance of the Q-Rapids quality model. Results: The participants of the evaluation perceived the metrics as well as the product and process factors of the Q-Rapids quality model as understandable. Also, they considered the Q-Rapids quality model relevant for identifying product and process deficiencies (e.g., blocking code situations). Conclusions: By means of heterogeneous data sources, the Q-Rapids quality model enables detecting problems that take more time to find manually and adds transparency among the perspectives of system, process, and usage.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Alexandria: Extensible Framework for Rapid Exploration of Social Media

The Alexandria system under development at IBM Research provides an extensible framework and platform for supporting a variety of big-data analytics and visualizations. The system is currently focused on enabling rapid exploration of text-based social media data. The system provides tools to help with constructing "domain models" (i.e., families of keywords and extractors to enable focus on tweets and other social media documents relevant to a project), to rapidly extract and segment the relevant social media and its authors, to apply further analytics (such as finding trends and anomalous terms), and visualizing the results. The system architecture is centered around a variety of REST-based service APIs to enable flexible orchestration of the system capabilities; these are especially useful to support knowledge-worker driven iterative exploration of social phenomena. The architecture also enables rapid integration of Alexandria capabilities with other social media analytics system, as has been demonstrated through an integration with IBM Research's SystemG. This paper describes a prototypical usage scenario for Alexandria, along with the architecture and key underlying analytics.Comment: 8 page

Towards automated data integration in software analytics

Software organizations want to be able to base their decisions on the latest set of available data and the real-time analytics derived from them. In order to support "real-time enterprise" for software organizations and provide information transparency for diverse stakeholders, we integrate heterogeneous data sources about software analytics, such as static code analysis, testing results, issue tracking systems, network monitoring systems, etc. To deal with the heterogeneity of the underlying data sources, we follow an ontology-based data integration approach in this paper and define an ontology that captures the semantics of relevant data for software analytics. Furthermore, we focus on the integration of such data sources by proposing two approaches: a static and a dynamic one. We first discuss the current static approach with a predefined set of analytic views representing software quality factors and further envision how this process could be automated in order to dynamically build custom user analysis using a semi-automatic platform for managing the lifecycle of analytics infrastructures.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Software analytics tools: an intentional view

Software analytic tools consume big amounts of data coming from either (or both) the software development process or the system usage and aggregate them into indicators which are rendered to different types of stakeholders, also offering them a portfolio of techniques and capabilities such as what-if analysis, prediction and alerts. Precisely, the variety of stakeholders and the different goals they pursue justifies the convenience of performing an intentional analysis of the use of software analytics tools. With this aim, we first enumerate the different stakeholders and identify their intentional relationships with software analytics tools in the form of dependencies. Then, we focus on one particular stakeholder, namely the requirements engineer, and identify further intentional elements represented in a strategic rationale model. The resulting model provides an abstract view of the domain which may help stakeholders when deciding on the adoption of software analytic tools in their particular context.This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project / funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00 / AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Big data and humanitarian supply networks: Can Big Data give voice to the voiceless?

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright © 2013 IEEE.Billions of US dollars are spent each year in emergency aid to save lives and alleviate the suffering of those affected by disaster. This aid flows through a humanitarian system that consists of governments, different United Nations agencies, the Red Cross movement and myriad non-governmental organizations (NGOs). As scarcer resources, financial crisis and economic inter-dependencies continue to constrain humanitarian relief there is an increasing focus from donors and governments to assess the impact of humanitarian supply networks. Using commercial (`for-profit') supply networks as a benchmark; this paper exposes the counter-intuitive competition dynamic of humanitarian supply networks, which results in an open-loop system unable to calibrate supply with actual need and impact. In that light, the phenomenon of Big Data in the humanitarian field is discussed and an agenda for the `datafication' of the supply network set out as a means of closing the loop between supply, need and impact