Software analytics for software engineering: A tertiary review

TL;DR

This paper reviews five secondary studies on software analytics in software engineering, revealing fragmented perspectives and emphasizing the need for a comprehensive overview to unify findings and guide future research.

Contribution

It provides a tertiary review that synthesizes existing secondary studies, highlighting gaps and the lack of a unified understanding in software analytics for SE.

Findings

Negligible overlap in primary studies across secondary reviews

Secondary studies offer fragmented views of software analytics

A comprehensive overview can unify insights and guide future work

Abstract

Software analytics (SA) is frequently proposed as a tool to support practitioners in software engineering (SE) tasks. We have observed that several secondary studies on SA have been published. Some of these studies have overlapping aims and some have even been published in the same calendar year. This presents an opportunity to analyze the congruence or divergence of the conclusions in these studies. Such an analysis can help identify broader generalizations beyond any of the individual secondary studies. We identified five secondary studies on the use of SA for SE. These secondary studies cover primary research from 2000 to 2021. Despite the overlapping objectives and search time frames of these secondary studies, there is negligible overlap of primary studies between these secondary studies. Thus, each of them provides an isolated view, and together, they provide a fragmented view, i.e., there is no ``common picture'' of the area. Thus, we conclude that an overview of the literature identified by these secondary studies would be useful in providing a more comprehensive overview of the topic.