Pragmatic prioritization of software quality assurance efforts

A plethora of recent work leverages historical data to help practitioners better prioritize their software quality assurance efforts. However, the adoption of this prior work in practice remains low. In our work, we identify a set of challenges that need to be addressed to make previous work on quality assurance prioritization more pragmatic. We outline four guidelines that address these challenges to make prior work on software quality assurance more pragmatic: 1) Focused Granularity (i.e., small prioritization units), 2) Timely Feedback (i.e., results can be acted on in a timely fashion), 3) Estimate Effort (i.e., estimate the time it will take to complete tasks), and 4) Evaluate Generality (i.e., evaluate findings across multiple projects and multiple domains). We present two approaches, at the code and change level, that demonstrate how prior approaches can be more pragmatic.