Guest Editorial: Special Section on Mining Software Repositories
Lin Tan, Abram Hindle · Empirical Software Engineering · 2019
Mining software repositories as a research area arose from the availability of open source code and information about open source software development.Many open source projects from 2000 on started publishing not only versioned releases of their software, but they were enabling open access to their version control systems, configuration management systems, wikis, mailing lists, and issue trackers.This open access lowered the barriers for researchers of all sorts to start evaluating theories of software development against projects in the wild, as well as discover methods of software development in the wild without the heavy constraint of industrial partnership.Mining software repositories started as a data mining exercise to extract as much as possible from software projects to aid development or reason about software engineering in general.This bolstered empirical software engineering which sought to study software development and software engineering from a fundamentally quantitative and qualitative point of view-this was different than much of the prior research which was tool building or proscriptive recommendations for processes.This special section on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) serves to highlight and elaborate on papers from the International Conference on Mining Software Repositories 2017.A workshop on mining software repositories was founded in 2004 and grew into an international conference, which still honors its roots in extraction of software source code and metadata from various sources.This special section serves to showcase and elaborate on the full papers and data showcase papers of particular interest to the MSR reviewers.Many papers were nominated and a few were chosen at the conference and invited.The special section gives our authors more space to be more thorough and concise, explore deeper into the topics discussed at the conference, and do better science in general.Each paper was rigorously reviewed by three or more reviewers,