Database techniques for the analysis and exploration of software repositories
Omar Alonso · 2004
In a typical software engineering project, there is a large and diverse body of documents that a development team produces, including requirement documents, specifications, designs, code, and bug reports. Documents typically have different formats and are managed in several repositories. The heterogeneity among document formats and the diversity of repositories make it often not feasible to query and explore the repositories in an integrated and transparent fashion during the different phases of the software development process. Here, we present a framework for the analysis and exploration of software repositories. Our approach applies database techniques to integrate, and manage different documents produced by a team. Tools that exploit the database functionality then allow for the processing of complex queries against a document collection to extract trends and analyze correlations, which provide important insights into the software development and maintenance process. We present a prototype implementation using the Apache Web-server project as a case study.