Peter Sandborn

Ray Islam, Peter Sandborn

Prognostic and Health Management (PHM) has been widely applied to hardware systems in the electronics and non-electronics domains but has not been explored for software. While software does not decay over time, it can degrade over release cycles. Software health management is confined to diagnostic assessments that identify problems, whereas prognostic assessment potentially indicates when in the future a problem will become detrimental. Relevant research areas such as software defect prediction, software reliability prediction, predictive maintenance of software, software degradation, and software performance prediction, exist, but all of these represent diagnostic models built upon historical data, none of which can predict an RUL for software. This paper addresses the application of PHM concepts to software systems for fault predictions and RUL estimation. Specifically, this paper addresses how PHM can be used to make decisions for software systems such as version update and upgrade, module changes, system reengineering, rejuvenation, maintenance scheduling, budgeting, and total abandonment. This paper presents a method to prognostically and continuously predict the RUL of a software system based on usage parameters (e.g., the numbers and categories of releases) and performance parameters (e.g., response time). The model developed has been validated by comparing actual data, with the results that were generated by predictive models. Statistical validation (regression validation, and k-fold cross validation) has also been carried out. A case study, based on publicly available data for the Bugzilla application is presented. This case study demonstrates that PHM concepts can be applied to software systems and RUL can be calculated to make system management decisions.

Mohammad Rubyet Islam, Peter Sandborn

This research explores the application of Multimodal Generative AI to enhance story point estimation in Agile software development. By integrating text, image, and categorical data using advanced models like BERT, CNN, and XGBoost, our approach surpasses the limitations of traditional single-modal estimation methods. The results demonstrate strong accuracy for simpler story points, while also highlighting challenges in more complex categories due to data imbalance. This study further explores the impact of categorical data, particularly severity, on the estimation process, emphasizing its influence on model performance. Our findings emphasize the transformative potential of multimodal data integration in refining AI-driven project management, paving the way for more precise, adaptable, and domain-specific AI capabilities. Additionally, this work outlines future directions for addressing data variability and enhancing the robustness of AI in Agile methodologies.