Software Development Analytics in Practice: A Systematic Literature Review

TL;DR

This systematic review examines the application of Software Development Analytics over the past decade, highlighting prevalent data sources, methods, and gaps in practical implementations, especially in process mining and security analysis.

Contribution

It provides an aggregated view of recent studies, classifies their impact, and identifies gaps such as limited process mining and risk management in practical settings.

Findings

Source code repositories and experimental case studies are common data sources.

Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis are the most used mining methods.

Process mining is rarely applied in practice.

Abstract

Context:Software Development Analytics is a research area concerned with providing insights to improve product deliveries and processes. Many types of studies, data sources and mining methods have been used for that purpose. Objective:This systematic literature review aims at providing an aggregate view of the relevant studies on Software Development Analytics in the past decade, with an emphasis on its application in practical settings. Method:Definition and execution of a search string upon several digital libraries, followed by a quality assessment criteria to identify the most relevant papers. On those, we extracted a set of characteristics (study type, data source, study perspective, development life-cycle activities covered, stakeholders, mining methods, and analytics scope) and classified their impact against a taxonomy. Results:Source code repositories, experimental case studies, and developers are the most common data sources, study types, and stakeholders, respectively. Product and project managers are also often present, but less than expected. Mining methods are evolving rapidly and that is reflected in the long list identified. Descriptive statistics are the most usual method followed by correlation analysis. Being software development an important process in every organization, it was unexpected to find that process mining was present in only one study. Most contributions to the software development life cycle were given in the quality dimension. Time management and costs control were lightly debated. The analysis of security aspects suggests it is an increasing topic of concern for practitioners. Risk management contributions are scarce. Conclusions:There is a wide improvement margin for software development analytics in practice. For instance, mining and analyzing the activities performed by software developers in their actual workbench, the IDE.