Scope & Goal

Software systems have grown increasingly large and complex in today’s highly interconnected world. Communication, production, healthcare, transportation and education all increasingly rely on “Big Software”. This increasing dependence makes reliable software systems a major concern and stresses the need for effective prediction of software failures. Since software is evolving and operates in a highly dynamic and changing environment, it becomes difficult if not impossible to anticipate all problems at design-time.

Within the BSR research program that has started in 2015, we propose to shift the main focus from a priori software design to a posteriori software analytics, thereby exploiting the large amounts of event data generated by today's systems. The core idea is to study software systems in vivo, i.e., at runtime and in their natural habitat. We would like to understand the actual behavior of software, to detect and predict future violations (e.g. deviations from some normative model, privacy and security constraints, etc.) and to provide insightful recommendations for software engineering related tasks (e.g. development, testing, debugging, configuration, etc.). This paradigm shift requires new forms of empirical investigation that go far beyond the common practice of collecting error messages and providing software updates. Novel techniques in process mining, visualization, security, feedback, and analytics are being developed within a joint collaboration between the three technical universities.

The aim of the BSR winter school is to bring together researchers, industry professionals and students to work on a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary understanding of the current problems and challenges related to in vivo software analytics concepts and practices. The school will cover software analytics related topics (including: dynamic analysis, testing, visualization, security and software analytics in the large) andprocess mining as a new enabler for in vivo software analytics. Lectures are combined with hands-on sessions that will help you to understand theoretical principles and how to apply them.