Informing development decisions: From data to information

Software engineers generate vast quantities of development artifacts such as source code, bug reports, test cases, usage logs, etc., as they create and maintain their projects. The information contained in these artifacts could provide valuable insights into the software quality and adoption, as well as development process. However, very little of it is available in the way that is immediately useful to various stakeholders. This research aims to extract and analyze data from software repositories to provide software practitioners with up-to-date and insightful information that can support informed decisions related to the business, management, design, or development of software systems. This data-centric decision-making is known as analytics. In particular, we demonstrate that by employing software development analytics, we can help developers make informed decisions around user adoption of a software project, code review process, as well as improve developers' awareness of their working context.