The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data; Quantitative Methods

Using the tools of quantitative data science, software engineers that can predict useful information on new projects based on past projects. This tutorial reflects on the state-of-the-art in quantitative reasoning in this important field. This tutorial discusses the following: (a) when local data is scarce, we show how to adapt data from other organizations to local problems; (b) when working with data of dubious quality, we show how to prune spurious information; (c) when data or models seem too complex, we show how to simplify data mining results; (d) when the world changes, and old models need to be updated, we show how to handle those updates; (e) when the effect is too complex for one model, we show to how reason over ensembles.