Title: Learning Effective Changes for Software Projects,
Abstract: The primary motivation of much of software analytics is decision making. How
to make these decisions? Should one make decisions based on lessons that arise
from within a particular project? Or should one generate these decisions from
across multiple projects? This work is an attempt to answer these questions.
Our work was motivated by a realization that much of the current generation
software analytics tools focus primarily on prediction. Indeed prediction is a
useful task, but it is usually followed by "planning" about what actions need
to be taken. This research seeks to address the planning task by seeking
methods that support actionable analytics that offer clear guidance on what to
do. Specifically, we propose XTREE and BELLTREE algorithms for generating a set
of actionable plans within and across projects. Each of these plans, if
followed will improve the quality of the software project.