Software analytics

Software analytics refers to analytics specific to software systems and related software development processes. It aims at describing, predicting, and improving development, maintenance, and management of complex software systems. Methods and techniques of software analytics typically rely on gathering, analyzing, and visualizing information found in the manifold data sources in the scope of software systems and their software development processes - software analytics "turns it into actionable insight to inform better decisions related to software".

Software analytics represents a base component of software diagnosis that generally aims at generating findings, conclusions, and evaluations about software systems and their implementation, composition, behavior, and evolution. Software analytics frequently uses and combines approaches and techniques from statistics, prediction analysis, data mining, and scientific visualization. For example, software analytics can map data by means of software maps that allow for interactive exploration.

Data under exploration and analysis by software analytics exists in software lifecycle, including source code, software requirement specifications, bug reports, test cases, execution traces/logs, and real-world user feedback, etc. Data plays a critical role in modern software development, because hidden in the data is the information and insight about the quality of software and services, the experience that software users receive, as well as the dynamics of software development.

Insightful information obtained by software analytics is information that conveys meaningful and useful understanding or knowledge towards performing the target task. Typically insightful information cannot be easily obtained by direct investigation on the raw data without the aid of analytic technologies.

Actionable information obtained by software analytics is information upon which software practitioners can come up with concrete solutions (better than existing solutions if any) towards completing the target task.

Software analytics focuses on trinity of software systems, software users, and software development process:

Software systems: Depending on scale and complexity, the spectrum of software systems can span from operating systems for devices to large networked systems that consist of thousands of servers. System quality such as reliability, performance and security, etc., is the key to success of modern software systems. As the system scale and complexity greatly increase, larger amount of data, e.g., run-time traces and logs, is generated; and data becomes a critical means to monitor, analyze, understand and improve system quality.

...
Wikipedia