Roundtable: What's next in software analytics

Experts in software analytics (SA) share their views on what they thought were the most important, or overlooked, aspect of this field. According to Ahmed E. Hassan, NSERC BlackBerry Software Engineering Chair, SA brings the notion of business intelligence to the software industry through fact-based decision support systems. Future SA research must look beyond these mundane tasks for SA to become a powerful, strategic, decision-making instrument. SA needs to service a project's various stakeholders, its marketing, sales, support, and legal teams. Abram Hindle, an assistant professor of computing science at the University of Alberta, sees a future in software analytics where layers of context are taken into consideration. Per Runeson, a professor in software engineering at Lund University, says that the visualization is what will make the software analytics powerful. Sunghum Kim, an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says that there is a need to provide the services of information analysts to developers and assist them in making the right decisions.