SHF: Small: Asked and Answered: Intelligent Data Science for Software Projects

Software and systems engineering projects accrue large amounts of development data including requirements, design, code, test cases, and fault logs. When combined with the power of software analytics this data could be used to provide actionable intelligence to project stakeholders. For example, a developer might ask to view all "safety-related code which is likely to exhibit runtime faults." The proposed work will deliver a solution named Asked and Answered for Software Intensive Projects (AA) and will support a broad range of analytic queries. To foster the transition of AA to practice, the researchers will partner with industry collaborators throughout the project and develop an open-source framework facilitating the deployment of AA technology into an industrial environment. A series of natural language Query Challenges will be designed and disseminated and used to train Software Engineering students in a broad spectrum of software analytics. Delivering the AA solution requires several non-trivial challenges to be addressed. First, a natural language (NL) query interface will be developed allowing stakeholders to issue queries in their own words and from their own perspective on the project. These queries will then be transformed into a structured, executable format. Heuristics and statistical inferencing techniques will be adopted and interactive mechanisms will be designed to seek clarification from the user when the query cannot be disambiguated automatically. Software analytics will be integrated into the query mechanism so that AA can respond to a wide range of analytical questions. AA will support the dynamic composition of primitive functions into execution flows in order to service a wide range of analytical queries. Finally, AA will deliver a query engine capable of generating optimized query execution plans which take into account the nuances of the domain - namely its heterogeneous data formats, distributed tools, and the dynamic runtime requirements of analytic functions.