Grant: Collaborative Research and Training Experience

The goal of the proposed CREATE Software Analytics Research (SOAR) program is to train HQP in the area of Software Analytics in collaboration with our industrial partners. Software analytics can enrich every software development activity with insights extracted from past projects and the enormous amounts of data that are generated throughout the software lifecycle, from requirements specifications, design documents, and source code to bug reports, test cases, run-time logs/traces, user feedback, developer communication, discussions in large crowdsourced platforms (e.g., Stack Overflow) or even in source-code repositories (e.g., GitHub). By exploring this data one can gain insights into the quality of the software and its functionality, can pinpoint usability problems, can assess software-development dynamics, and devise effective solutions for challenging tasks. Although software analytics is an important area of research in both academia and industry, there are no specific graduate programs in Canada targeted at developing software-analytics skills to produce the software professionals that our software industry so direly needs. SOAR will offer students who wish to work in software analytics the first Canadian industrially-grounded, academically-driven, graduate-level experiential learning program. The SOAR program will advance software technology and train HQP to help ensure that software being developed is usable, reliable, sustainable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective.