more actors via one or more media so that the technology recipient sustainably adopts the object in the recipients context in order to evidently achieve a specific purpose." [8] . We report the industrial scenario and describe our experiences on the industry-academia journey in two pilot projects that used a software analytics platform to solve their quality management problems. Our previous work focused on incrementally developing a software analytics platform in a previous formative stage

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... This study reports our experiences with the software analytics platform Q-Rapids (hereafter referred to as Q-Rapids) during its summative evaluation. It is available at https://github.com/q-rapids. In Section II, we describe the context of our study, including the software analytics platform and our two companies. Section III contains the research methodology applied, while Section IV presents the challenges and benefits experienced while using Q-Rapids. Section V contains threats to validity and Section VI presents related work. The paper concludes with a summary and next steps in Section VII. II. RESEARCH SETTING This section describes the software analytics platform used in the two companies that took part in this study. To fully understand the context of the dynamic validation (i.e., pilot projects) [5] in the companies, we report their application domain, problem statements, needs in terms of managing quality, and how the software analytics platform was introduced. A. The software analytics platform The software analytics platform Q-Rapids was developed as part of the Q-Rapids project 1 and provides tool-supported quality management in the context of agile software development [9]- [11] . It includes several software analytics capabilities to support data-driven decision-making, such as collecting and integrating data from different data sources, real-time modeling of this data, prediction and simulation 1 https://www.q-rapids.eu/ Abstract-Background: Despite the growth in the use of software analytics platforms in industry, little empirical evidence is available about the challenges that practitioners face and the value that these platforms provide. Aim: The goal of this research is to explore the benefits o f u sing a s oftware a nalytics platform for practitioners managing quality. Method: In a technology transfer project, a software analytics platform was incrementally developed between academic and industrial partners to address their software quality problems. This paper focuses on exploring the value provided by this software analytics platform in two pilot projects. Results: Practitioners emphasized major benefits including the improvement of product quality and process performance and an increased awareness of product readiness. They especially perceived the semi-automated functionality of generating quality requirements by the software analytics platform as the benefit with the highest impact and most novel value for them. Conclusions: Practitioners can benefit f rom m odern s oftware analytics platforms, especially if they have time to adopt such a platform carefully and integrate it into their quality assurance activities.