Background: Data mining and analyzing of public Git software repositories is a growing research field. The tools used for studies that investigate a single project or a group of projects have been refined, but it is not clear whether the results obtained on such ``convenience samples'' generalize. Aims: This paper aims to elucidate the difficulties faced by researchers who would like to ascertain the generalizability of their findings by introducing an interface that addresses the issues with obtaining representative samples. Results: To do that we explore how to exploit the World of Code system to make software repository sampling and analysis much more accessible. Specifically, we present a resource for Mining Software Repository researchers that is intended to simplify data sampling and retrieval workflow and, through that, increase the validity and completeness of data. Conclusions: This system has the potential to provide researchers a resource that greatly eases the difficulty of data retrieval and addresses many of the currently standing issues with data sampling.
Software repository mining is the foundation for many empirical software engineering studies. The collection and analysis of detailed data can be challenging, especially if data shall be shared to enable replicable research and open science practices. SmartSHARK is an ecosystem that supports replicable and reproducible research based on software repository mining.
The SmartSHARK repository mining data is a collection of rich and detailed information about the evolution of software projects. The data is unique in its diversity and contains detailed information about each change, issue tracking data, continuous integration data, as well as pull request and code review data. Moreover, the data does not contain only raw data scraped from repositories, but also annotations in form of labels determined through a combination of manual analysis and heuristics, as well as links between the different parts of the data set. The SmartSHARK data set provides a rich …
Mining and storage of data from software repositories is typically done on a per-project basis, where each project uses a unique combination of data schema, extraction tools, and (intermediate) storage infrastructure. We introduce GraphRepo, a tool that enables a unified approach to extract data from Git repositories, store it, and share it across repository mining projects. GraphRepo usesNeo4j, an ACID-compliant graph database management system, and allows modular plug-in of components for repository extraction (drillers), analysis (miners), and export (mappers). The graph enables a natural w…
Software projects under version control grow with each commit, accumulating up to hundreds of thousands of commits per repository. Especially for such large projects, the traversal of a repository and data extraction for static source code analysis poses a trade-off between granularity and speed. We showcase the command-line tool pyrepositoryminer that combines a set of optimization approaches for efficient traversal and data extraction from git repositories while being adaptable to third-party and custom software metrics and data extractions. The tool is written in Python and combines bare re…
Many software engineering studies or tasks rely on categorizing software engineering artifacts. In practice, this is done either by defining simple but often imprecise heuristics, or by manual labelling of the artifacts. Unfortunately, errors in these categorizations impact the tasks that rely on them. To improve the precision of these categorizations, we propose to gather heuristics in a collaborative heuristic repository, to which researchers can contribute a large amount of diverse heuristics for a variety of tasks on a variety of SE artifacts. These heuristics are then leveraged by state-o…
Reusing previously completed software repository to enhance the development process is a common phenomenon. If developers get suggestions from the existing projects they might be benefited a lot what they eventually expect while coding. The strategies available in this field have been rapidly changing day by day. There are a number of efforts that have been focusing on mining process and constructing repository. Some of them have emphasized on the web based code searching while others have integrated web based code searching in their customized tool. But web based approaches have inefficiency …
This paper proposes a software repository model together with associated tooling and consists of several complex, open-source GUI driven applications ready to be used in empirical software research. We start by providing the rationale for our repository and criteria that guided us in searching for suitable applications. We detail the model of the repository together with associated artifacts and supportive tooling. We detail current applications in the repository together with ways in which it can be further extended. Finally we provide examples of how our repository facilitates research in so…
Software development is getting changed so rapidly. It will be highly benefited if we can accelerate software development process by guiding developers. Appropriate guidelines and accurate recommendations to developers during development process can reduce software development expenses, as well as can save valuable times of developers. There are a number of approaches to speed up the software development process. It can be done through code assistance tools that help developers by recommending relevant items from searching particular repository of Application Programming Interface (API). Some …
The purpose of scholarly peer review is to evaluate the quality of scientific manuscripts. However, study after study demonstrates that peer review neither effectively nor reliably assesses research quality. Empirical standards attempt to address this problem by modelling a scientific community's expectations for each kind of empirical study conducted in that community. This should enhance not only the quality of research but also the reliability and predictability of peer review, as scientists adopt the standards in both their researcher and reviewer roles. However, these improvements depend …
Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is an applied and practise-oriented field aimed at solving real problems encountered by practitioners and bringing value to Industry. Replication of results and findings, generalizability and external validity, University-Industry collaboration, data sharing and creation dataset repositories are important issues in MSR research. Research consisting of bibliometric analysis of MSR paper shows lack of University-Industry collaboration, deficiency of studies on closed or propriety source dataset and lack of data as well as tool sharing by researchers. We conduct…
In today's world, social networking is an important (power full) medium of mass communication. People of almost all classes have been interacting with each other and sharing their views, moments, and ideas by using enormous user-friendly applications in different social networking sites. It's really unbelievable to find a person who never heard about the social network. The available social networking sites usually opportune their users to develop various customized applications through particular templates and embedded sources of codes. The users with average knowledge of development often en…
Popular (re)use of third-party open-source software (OSS) is evidence of the impact of hosting repositories like maven on software development today. Updating libraries is crucial, with recent studies highlighting the associated vulnerabilities with aging OSS libraries. The decision to migrate to a newer library can range from trivial (security threat) to complex (assessment of work required to accommodate the changes). By leveraging the `wisdom of the software repository crowd' we propose a simple and efficient approach to recommending `consented' library updates. Our Software Universe Graph …
This paper introduces the idea of mining container image repositories for configuration and other deployment information of software systems. Unlike traditional software repositories (e.g., source code repositories and app stores), image repositories encapsulate the entire execution ecosystem for running target software, including its configurations, dependent libraries and components, and OS-level utilities, which contributes to a wealth of data and information. We showcase the opportunities based on concrete software engineering tasks that can benefit from mining image repositories. To facil…
Developers use and contribute to repositories on GitHub. Documentation present in the repositories serves as an important source by helping developers to understand, maintain and contribute to the project. Currently, documentation in a repository is diversified, among various files, with most of it present in ReadMe files. However, other software artifacts in the repository, such as issue reports and pull requests could also contribute to documentation, without documentation being explicitly specified. Hence, in this paper, we propose a taxonomy of documentation sources by analyzing different …
Software development projects involve the use of a wide range of tools to produce a software artifact. Software repositories such as source control systems have become a focus for emergent research because they are a source of rich information regarding software development projects. The mining of such repositories is becoming increasingly common with a view to gaining a deeper understanding of the development process.
Background: Software development results in the production of various types of artifacts: source code, version control system metadata, bug reports, mailing list conversations, test data, etc. Empirical software engineering (ESE) has thrived mining those artifacts to uncover the inner workings of software development and improve its practices. But which artifacts are studied in the field is a moving target, which we study empirically in this paper.Aims: We quantitatively characterize the most frequently mined and co-mined software artifacts in ESE research and the research purposes they suppor…
The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) conference is a reputed, long-running and flagship conference in the area of Software Analytics which has successfully completed more than one decade as of year 2016. We conduct a bibliometric and scientific publication mining based study to study how the conference has evolved over the recent past 13 years (from 2004 to 2007 as a workshop and then from 2008 to 2016 as a conference). Our objective is to perform an examination of the state of MSR so that the MSR community can identify strengths, areas of improvements and future directions for the conferenc…
Many of quality approaches are described in hundreds of textual pages. Manual processing of information consumes plenty of resources. In this report we present a text mining approach applied on CMMI, one well known and widely known quality approach. The text mining analysis can provide a quick overview on the scope of a quality approaches. The result of the analysis could accelerate the understanding and the selection of quality approaches.
Considering user preferences is a determining factor in optimizing the value of a software release. This is due to the fact that user preferences for software features specify the values of those features and consequently determine the value of the release. Certain features of a software however, may encourage or discourage users to prefer (select or use) other features. As such, value of a software feature could be positively or negatively influenced by other features. Such influences are known as Value-related Feature (Requirement) Dependencies. Value-related dependencies need to be consider…
In this paper, we describe the extraction of source code metrics from the Jazz repository and the application of data mining techniques to identify the most useful of those metrics for predicting the success or failure of an attempt to construct a working instance of the software product. We present results from a systematic study using the J48 classification method. The results indicate that only a relatively small number of the available software metrics that we considered have any significance for predicting the outcome of a build. These significant metrics are discussed and implication of …
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Open-Source Projects and Libraries are being used in software development while also bearing multiple security vulnerabilities. This use of third party ecosystem creates a new kind of attack surface for a product in development. An intelligent attacker can attack a product by exploiting one of the vulnerabilities present in linked projects and libraries. In this paper, we mine threat intelligence about open source projects and libraries from bugs and issues reported on public code repositories. We also track library and project dependencies for installed software on a client machine. We repres…
Software Repositories contain knowledge on how software engineering teams work, communicate, and collaborate. It can be used to develop a data-informed view of a team's development process, which in turn can be employed for process improvement initiatives. In modern, Agile development methods, process improvement takes place in Retrospective meetings, in which the last development iteration is discussed. However, previously proposed activities that take place in these meetings often do not rely on project data, instead depending solely on the perceptions of team members. We propose new Retrosp…
The recent progress of artificial intelligence(AI) has shown great potentials for alleviating human burden in various complex tasks. From the view of software engineering, AI techniques can be seen in many fundamental aspects of development, such as source code comprehension, in which state-of-the-art models are implemented to extract and express the meaning of code snippets automatically. However, such technologies are still struggling to tackle and comprehend the complex structures within industrial code, thus far from real-world applications. In the present work, we built an innovative and …
Outdated documentation is a pervasive problem in software development, preventing effective use of software, and misleading users and developers alike. We posit that one possible reason why documentation becomes out of sync so easily is that developers are unaware of when their source code modifications render the documentation obsolete. Ensuring that the documentation is always in sync with the source code takes considerable effort, especially for large codebases. To address this situation, we propose an approach that can automatically detect code element references that survive in the docume…
This abstract presents the automatic link extraction pitfalls based on our experience on manually investigating links in the RubyGems package manager metadata. This work can lead in automating the link extraction approach so as to avoid these pitfalls and produce more complete datasets to be used by researchers when they investigate the multi-platform evolution of software ecosystems.
In this paper, we describe our experience implementing some of classic software engineering metrics using Boa - a large-scale software repository mining platform - and its dedicated language. We also aim to take an advantage of the Boa infrastructure to propose new software metrics and to characterize open source projects by software metrics to provide reference values of software metrics based on large number of open source projects. Presented software metrics, well known and proposed in this paper, can be used to build large-scale software defect prediction models. Additionally, we present t…
Federal University of ABC（巴西联邦大学ABC分校）；Federal University of Technology - Parana (UTFPR)（Parana）
The main purpose of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is to discover the latest enhancements and provide an insight into how to make improvements in a software project. In light of it, this paper updates the MSR findings of the original MSR Cookbook, by first conducting a systematic mapping study to elicit and analyze the state-of-the-art, and then proposing an extended version of the Cookbook. This extended Cookbook was built on four high-level themes, which were derived from the analysis of a list of 112 selected studies. Hence, it was used to consolidate the extended Cookbook as a contribu…
There is growing interest in mining software repository data to understand, and predict, various aspects of team processes. In particular, text mining and natural-language processing (NLP) techniques have supported such efforts. Visualization may also supplement text mining to reveal unique multi-dimensional insights into software teams' behavioral processes. We demonstrate the utility of combining these approaches in this study. Future application of these methods to the study of teams' behavioral processes offers promise for both research and practice.
Situational method engineering uses a repository of reusable method fragments that are derived from existing software development methodologies and industrial best practices to simplify the construction of any project-specific software development methodology aligned with specific characteristics of a project at hand. In this respect, OPEN is a well-established, standardized and popular approach for situational method engineering. It has a large repository of reusable method fragments called OPF that method engineers can select and assemble them according to the requirements of a project to co…
Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is a rigorous methodology applied for Evidence-Based Software Engineering (EBSE) that identify, assess and synthesize the relevant evidence for answering specific research questions. Benefiting from the booming online materials in the era of Web 2.0, the technical Web content starts acting as alternative sources for EBSE. Web knowledge has been investigated and derived from Web content mining and knowledge discovery techniques, however they are still significantly different from reviewing academic literature. Thus the direct adoption of Web knowledge in EBSE …
Writing requirements is a two-way process. In this paper we use to classify Functional Requirements (FR) and Non Functional Requirements (NFR) statements from Software Requirements Specification (SRS) documents. This is systematically transformed into state charts considering all relevant information. The current paper outlines how test cases can be automatically generated from these state charts. The application of the states yields the different test cases as solutions to a planning problem. The test cases can be used for automated or manual software testing on system level. And also the pap…
Relaying on early effort estimation to predict the required number of resources is not often sufficient, and could lead to under or over estimation. It is widely acknowledge that that software development process should be refined regularly and that software prediction made at early stage of software development is yet kind of guesses. Even good predictions are not sufficient with inherent uncertainty and risks. The stage-effort estimation allows project manager to re-allocate correct number of resources, re-schedule project and control project progress to finish on time and within budget. In …
To evaluate software maintenance techniques and tools in controlled experiments with human participants, researchers currently use projects and tasks selected on an ad-hoc basis. This can unrealistically favor their tool, and it makes the comparison of results difficult. We suggest a gradual creation of a benchmark repository with projects, tasks, and metadata relevant for human-based studies. In this paper, we discuss the requirements and challenges of such a repository, along with the steps which could lead to its construction.
Software repositories such as Git have become a relevant source of information for software engineer researcher. For instance, the detection of Commits that fulfill a given criterion (e.g., bugfixing commits) is one of the most frequent tasks done to understand the software evolution. However, to our knowledge, there is not open-source tools that, given a Git repository, returns all the instances of a given change pattern. In this paper we present Coming, a tool that takes an input a Git repository and mines instances of change patterns on each commit. For that, Coming computes fine-grained ch…
Context: Profiling developers is challenging since many factors, such as their skills, experience, development environment and behaviors, may influence a detailed analysis and the delivery of coherent interpretations. Objective: We aim at profiling software developers by mining their software development process. To do so, we performed a controlled experiment where, in the realm of a Python programming contest, a group of developers had the same well-defined set of requirements specifications and a well-defined sprint schedule. Events were collected from the PyCharm IDE, and from the Mooshak a…
Background: Retrieving and mining practitioners' self--reports of their professional experience of software practice could provide valuable evidence for research. We are, however, unaware of any existing reviews of research conducted in this area. Objective: To review and classify previous research, and to identify insights into the challenges research confronts when retrieving and mining practitioners' self-reports of their experience of software practice. Method: We conduct an exploratory review to identify and classify 42 articles. We analyse a selection of those articles for insights on ch…
Service-orientation is a promising paradigm that enables the engineering of large-scale distributed software systems using rigorous software development processes. The existing problem is that every service-oriented software development project often requires a customized development process that provides specific service-oriented software engineering tasks in support of requirements unique to that project. To resolve this problem and allow situational method engineering, we have defined a set of method fragments in support of the engineering of the project-specific service-oriented software d…
Many empirical software engineering studies show that there is a great need for repositories where source code is acquired, filtered and classified. During the last few years, Ethereum block explorer services have emerged as a popular project to explore and search Ethereum blockchain data such as transactions, addresses, tokens, smart-contracts' source code, prices and other activities taking place on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite the availability of this kind of services, retrieving specific information useful to empirical software engineering studies, such as the study of smart-contracts'…
This paper is about understanding the nature of bug fixing by analyzing thousands of bug fix transactions of software repositories. It then places this learned knowledge in the context of automated program repair. We give extensive empirical results on the nature of human bug fixes at a large scale and a fine granularity with abstract syntax tree differencing. We set up mathematical reasoning on the search space of automated repair and the time to navigate through it. By applying our method on 14 repositories of Java software and 89,993 versioning transactions, we show that not all probabilist…
With the widespread use and adoption of mobile platforms like Android a new software quality concern has emerged -- energy consumption. However, developing energy-efficient software and applications requires knowledge and likewise proper tooling to support mobile developers. To this aim, we present an approach to examine the energy evolution of software revisions based on their API interactions. The approach stems from the assumption that the utilization of an API has direct implications on the energy being consumed during runtime. Based on an empirical evaluation, we show initial results that…
Context: Given the acknowledged need to understand the people processes enacted during software development, software repositories and mailing lists have become a focus for many studies. However, researchers have tended to use mostly mathematical and frequency-based techniques to examine the software artifacts contained within them. Objective: There is growing recognition that these approaches uncover only a partial picture of what happens during software projects, and deeper contextual approaches may provide further understanding of the intricate nature of software teams' dynamics. We demonst…
In software engineering, a great number of new approaches are being actively researched, and a lot of tools are being developed based on them. These tools require a framework for their creation and an opportunity to be used by potential developers. Modern IDEs provide both. In this paper, we describe the main capabilities of the IntelliJ Platform that could be useful for researchers that are developing code analysis tools. To illustrate the benefits of using the platform, we describe several use cases that researchers might be interested in: mining software data, running machine learning model…
