Bayesian networks for evidence-based decision-making in software engineering

Recommendation systems in software engineering (SE) should be designed to integrate evidence into practitioners experience. Bayesian networks (BNs) provide a natural statistical framework for evidence-based decision-making by incorporating an integrated summary of the available evidence and associated uncertainty (of consequences). In this study, we follow the lead of computational biology and healthcare decision-making, and investigate the applications of BNs in SE in terms of 1) main software engineering challenges addressed, 2) techniques used to learn causal relationships among variables, 3) techniques used to infer the parameters, and 4) variable types used as BN nodes. We conduct a systematic mapping study to investigate each of these four facets and compare the current usage of BNs in SE with these two domains. Subsequently, we highlight the main limitations of the usage of BNs in SE and propose a Hybrid BN to improve evidence-based decision-making in SE. In two industrial cases, we build sample hybrid BNs and evaluate their performance. The results of our empirical analyses show that hybrid BNs are powerful frameworks that combine expert knowledge with quantitative data. As researchers in SE become more aware of the underlying dynamics of BNs, the proposed models will also advance and naturally contribute to evidence based-decision-making.