Software Analytics

Last updated on Oct 6, 2020

What is Software Analytics

Software analytics aims at helping individual or team to make better decision in software development. For this reason, software-related data such as source code or development history is analyzed. Afterwards, the corresponding result is provided in a way that can be shared among individual or team.

Reference Work：Tim Menzies, Thomas Zimmermann. “Software Analytics: So What?”. In Journal IEEE Software archive Volume 30 Issue 4, July 2013 Pages 31-37.

Our current Research Topics

Keyword: Code Clone

Code Clone refers to the duplicated portions within program source code. As a research example, please refer to Code Clone Origin Analysis Using Version Control System (The goal of this work is to construct an environment that could present the transition of code clone in a comprehensible way by analyzing development history managed by version control system).

Other related research:

Investigation into the Defect Occurrence Based on Positional Relationship between Code Clone and Clone Fragment
Investigation into the Effect of Positional Relationship between Code Clone and Code Fragment on Defect Occurrence
Investigation for Code Clone in Hardware Description Language

Keyword: Refactoring

Refactoring refers to improving source code design without changing the behavior of the program. As the renowned pioneer of refactoring, Martin Fowler mentioned that performing refactoring can help to reduce bugs’ mixing into source code in his book. As such, this research aims at clarify such point by estimating the happening of refactoring from source code change log and comparing the results with the bug fix data stored in bug management system.

Other related research:

Investigating the Characteristics of Method Extract Cases by Using Process Metrics
An Approach for Fine-Grained Detection of Refactoring Instances Using Repository with Syntactic Information
Recommending Extract Method Opportunities Using Machine Learning
Survey of Refactoring Detection Techniques Based on Change History Analysis
Methods for Empirical Analysis and Evaluation of Refactoring Instances

Keyword: Programming Education

Investigating build errors in software development PBL
Using snapshot to specify points of blockage in programming exercise
Pockets: An Exploratory Programming Support Environment for Introductory Programming Exercises
Detecting Exploratory Programming Behaviors for Introductory Programming Exercises
Investigating the Model of Automatically Detecting Exploratory Programming Behaviors
An Investigation into the Behavior of the Novice Programmers Based on Build Histories in Software Development Practice
A System to Support Understanding of Programming Behavior in Exploratory Programming by Novices

Other research for software analytics

MUDABlue: System for automatically classifying software

Massive number of software are registered in software repository. In this research, we aim at facilitating the reuse of software as well as communication between developers by providing mechanism that can discover similar softwares from software repository. Click for more details (in Japanese)．