Today I had the pleasure of giving a mini-keynote together with Ahmed Hassan and Tom Zimmermann at the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2010). I say mini-keynote because we were three and we had one hour to provide some of our views on where we believe the field of software maintenance should go.

I introduced the concept of humane assessment and argued that we have to get development teams actually look at the vast systems and data to make informed decisions by actively building custom tools.

The slides I used can be found below:

Tom talked about his experience of data mining inside Microsoft and he argued that we need to make data accessible and actionable. Ahmed then complemented the our points by arguing why we need to look beyond the development world and use data mining for answering problems in the non-development world.

Judging by the reactions we got, I believe data assessment is getting towards the prominent position it deserves.