Improving Software Quality through Effective Decision Support

如果软件正确地运行，并显示出各种非功能需求，例如性能、安全性和易于更改，则被认为是高质量的软件。高质量的软件使用户可以专注于他们的工作，而不是与有缺陷或速度慢的软件作斗争。通过缩短开发进度和降低软件维护成本，高质量的软件使创建软件的开发组织受益。已经证明对软件质量有影响的一个关键因素是软件的设计。尽管有证据表明，不适当的设计选择和设计缺陷会导致软件质量降低，但很少有支持帮助软件开发人员做出适当的设计选择，从而获得高质量的软件。这项研究计划的长期目标是帮助软件开发人员在工作中做出明智和适当的设计决策，从而生产出更高质量的软件。这项研究将使软件项目的设计信息（通常是不可见和不可接近的）具体化，并可用于支持项目中的明智决策，通过分析项目间的设计趋势来改进开发方法，并支持良好设计实践的教育。该研究计划有三个目标。首先，我们将通过算法和工具的开发来寻求系统的外部化设计决策，这些算法和工具可以从项目的工件历史中挖掘和表示设计决策，例如从拉取请求和代码审查中。在适当的地方，我们将这些决策与受该决策影响的代码联系起来。这个目标的目标是允许从各种开放源码项目构建外部化设计信息的存储库。其次，当开发人员工作时，我们将寻求自动识别开发人员工作的上下文，以启用智能设计建议的提供。我们将开发算法和技术来自动形成开发人员的工作环境，以实现有用的设计建议。第三，我们将展示创建有用的设计推荐工具是可能的，这些工具可以导致更高质量软件的开发。我们将利用前两个目标中的工作，在开发期间的特定干预点（例如代码审查）提供这种智能设计建议。我们将通过实验证明这些建议对软件质量有预期的影响。

Software is considered to be of high-quality if it functions correctly and exhibits a variety of non-functional requirements, such as being performant, secure and easy to change. High-quality software benefits users who can focus on their work rather than battling with buggy or slow software. High-quality software benefits the development organizations who create the software by shortening development schedules and by lowering software maintenance costs. A critical factor that has been shown to have an impact on software quality is the design of the software. Although evidence indicates that inappropriate design choices and design flaws lead to lower software quality, there is little support to help software developers make appropriate design choices that lead to high-quality software. The long-term objective of this research program is to assist software developers to make informed and appropriate design decisions as they work that lead to the production of higher-quality software. This research will enable design information about a software project, that has typically been invisible and inaccessible, to be externalized and to be available for supporting informed decision-making within a project, for improving development approaches through analysis of design trends across projects, and for supporting the education of good design practices. Three objectives are planned for the research program. First, we will seek to externalize design decisions for a system through the development of algorithms and tools to mine and represent design decisions from a project's artifact history, such as from pull requests and code reviews. Where appropriate, we will associate these decisions with code impacted by the decision. The goal for this objective is to enable a repository of externalized design information to be built from a variety of open source projects. Second, we will seek to automatically identify the context of a developer's work as they work to enable the provision of intelligent design advice. We will develop algorithms and techniques to automatically form a developer's work context to enable useful design recommendations. Third, we will show that it is possible to create useful design recommendation tools that lead to the development of higher-quality software. We will leverage the work from the first two objectives to provide this intelligent design advice at particular intervention points during development, such as code reviews. We will experimentally show that the recommendations have a desired effect on software quality.