Questions for Data Scientists in Software Engineering: A Replication
This is an incremental study that addresses the generalizability and timeliness of prior research for software engineers and data scientists.
The paper replicates a 2014 Microsoft study on questions for data scientists in software engineering, investigating whether the original 145 questions remain relevant across different software companies and in light of technological advances.
In 2014, a Microsoft study investigated the sort of questions that data science applied to software engineering should answer. This resulted in 145 questions that developers considered relevant for data scientists to answer, thus providing a research agenda to the community. Fast forward to five years, no further studies investigated whether the questions from the software engineers at Microsoft hold for other software companies, including software-intensive companies with different primary focus (to which we refer as software-defined enterprises). Furthermore, it is not evident that the problems identified five years ago are still applicable, given the technological advances in software engineering.