• As of late 2012, our Web searches show that Mozilla Firefox had 800,000 bug reports, and platforms such as Sourceforge.net and GitHub hosted 324,000 and 11.2 million projects, respectively.
• The PROMISE repository of software engineering data has grown to more than 100 projects and is just one of more than a dozen open source repositories that are readily available to industrial practitioners and researchers; see Table 1 for more.
• sharing models (one of the early models was proposed by Fumio Akiyama and says that we should expect more than a dozen bugs per KLOC; see the sidebar "Early 'Global' Models and Software Analytics"),
• sharing insights (for example, Christian Bird and his colleagues found that in the case of Windows Vista, it's possible to build high-quality software using distributed teams, just as long as the management is structured around code functionality—who works on what—and not merely on geography—who sits where 4),
• sharing data (as in Table 1's list of repositories), and
• sharing methods (the techniques by which we can convert data into models to find local models).
• novices in their journey from beginner to expert,
• managers when they assess potential hires,
• academics when they design subjects or degrees,
• professional bodies when they design accreditation programs,
• the identification of gaps in current techniques, and
• the design and implementation of new and better techniques.
• more and different data,
• more algorithms,
• faster decision making with the availability of more data and faster release cycles,
• more people involved in analytics as it becomes more routine to mine data,
• more education as more people analyze and work with data,
• more roles for data scientists and developers as this field matures with specialized subareas,
• more real-time analytics to address the challenges of quickly finding patterns in big data,
• more analytics for software systems such as mobile apps and games, and
• more impact of social tools in analytics.
Tim Menzies is a full professor in computer science at West Virginia University. His research focuses on combining carbon and silicon intelligence to produce smarter communities. He's an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, the Automated Software Engineering Journal, and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal. Menzies received a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of New South Wales. Contact him at firstname.lastname@example.org or via http://menzies.us.
Thomas Zimmermann is a researcher in the Empirical Software Engineering Group at Microsoft Research, adjunct assistant professor at the University of Calgary, and affiliate faculty at the University of Washington. His research interests include empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, development tools, social networking, and games analytics. He's an associate editor of IEEE Software and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal. Zimmermann received a PhD from Saarland University. Contact him at email@example.com or via http://thomas-zimmermann.com.