Leveraging development and field knowledge to assist developers and operators of large software systems

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The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field has impacted all facets of software research and practice. This line of research arose from the observation that developers, operators, and even software systems leave behind traces of data that can be mined to improve software quality and development practices. The international MSR community continues to demonstrate innovative approaches to recover useful and actionable information from static record-keeping repositories such as source control and bug tracking systems. MSR innovations are nowadays integrated into daily practices at some of the world's largest and most successful organizations: Microsoft, BlackBerry, AT&T Labs, CISCO, Mozilla and Avaya. The long-term vision of the proposed research program is establish MSR as a critical strategic tool throughout the lifetime of a software system, from inception to operation. In contrast, MSR currently focuses primarily on the software development phase, a relatively small time period given the excessively long and rapidly changing lifetime of software systems today. The short-term goals over the next five years, to be realized in collaboration with industrial partners including BlackBerry, and SAP, will focus on demonstrating the strategic value of field logs as a low-cost high-value mechanism to fuse development and field knowledge. Our short-term research will be carried out along two themes: (1) Assisting developers by leveraging field knowledge to improve logging; and (2) Assisting operators by leveraging development knowledge to cope with operational complexity. The proposed research program will train eleven HQP: 4 PhDs, 2 Masters and 5 undergraduate students. All HQP will collaborate closely with industrial partners, gaining an appreciation of the challenges facing practitioners on a daily basis and the potential for software data to address those challenges, as well as improving their professional skills and expanding their professional network.