A systematic mapping study on the employment of neural networks on software engineering projects: Where to go next?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Deep learning has recently experienced explosive growth in use, largely due to advances in neural networks and the availability of large corpora of domain data. Project management activities generate and handle large volumes of data. Software engineering closely relates to project management, so software engineering projects must be prone to the use of neural networks. We seek to obtain an accurate vision of how neural networks are being used in software engineering projects through a systematic mapping study. We confirm that neural networks have already made their way into these projects; however, we show that their current uses are limited to certain repetitive and legacy tasks. Given uncovered ample room for expansion, we point out a few directions the industry and academy can lean toward to in the next years for taking better advantage of neural networks in software engineering projects and immediately advancing the field. We investigate if, how, and to what extent have neural networks been employed to the advancement of software engineering projects. As such, a systematic mapping study was conducted, which led to the conclusion that even though these algorithms have indeed been employed on several software engineering tasks, this employment so far has been shy, mostly relying on legacy types of neural networks. More modern variants, namely, deep learning algorithms, are slowly gaining momentum and should be the trend going forward.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.078 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".