Guest editorial: mining software repositories

Excerpt

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field analyzes the rich data available in software repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and projects. Thanks to the ready availability of software configuration management, mailing list, and bug tracking repositories from open source projects, it has gained popularity since 2004 and continues to be one of the fastest growing fields in the area of software engineering. Researchers in this field empirically explore a range of software engineering questions using software repository data as the primary source of information. Some commonly explored areas include software evolution, models of software development processes, characterization of developers and their activities, prediction of future software qualities, use of machine learning techniques on software project data, software bug prediction, analysis of software change patterns, and analysis of code clones. This special issue provides five recent MSR papers, that are briefly discussed as follows. …