Welcome to the official website of MSR 2012!

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. The goal of this two-day working conference is to advance the science and practice of MSR.

The 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories is sponsored by IEEE TCSE and ACM SIGSOFT.

Call For Papers

Software repositories such as source control systems, archived communications between project personnel, and defect tracking systems are used to help manage the progress of software projects. Software practitioners and researchers are recognizing the benefits of mining this information to support the maintenance of software systems, improve software design/reuse, and empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. Research is now proceeding to uncover the ways in which mining these repositories can help to understand software development and software evolution, to support predictions about software development, and to exploit this knowledge concretely in planning future development.

The goal of this two-day working conference is to advance the science and practice of software engineering via the analysis of data stored in software repositories.

We solicit short papers (4 pages) and research papers (10 pages). Short papers should discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Accepted short papers will present their ideas in a short lightning talk. Full research papers are expected to describe new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers. Accepted full papers will present their ideas in a research talk at the conference. A selection of the best research papers will be invited for consideration in a special issue of the Springer journal Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) edited by Springer.

In the Mining Challenge, we invite researchers to demonstrate the usefulness of their mining tools on preselected software repositories and summarize their findings in a challenge report (4 pages). This year, the challenge is on the Android platform. We provide the change and bug report data for the Android platform and you should use your brain, tools, computational power, and magic to uncover interesting findings related to the Android platform.

Topics

Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:

• Analysis of software ecosystems and mining of repositories across multiple projects
• Models for social and development processes that occur in large software projects
• Prediction of future software qualities via analysis of software repositories
• Models of software project evolution based on historical repository data
• Characterization, classification, and prediction of software defects based on analysis of software repositories
• Techniques to model reliability and defect occurrences
• Search-driven software development, including search techniques to assist developers in finding suitable components and code fragments for reuse, and software search engines
• Analysis of change patterns and trends to assist in future development
• Visualization techniques and models of mined data
• Techniques and tools for capturing new forms of data for storage in software repositories, such as effort data, fine-grained changes, and refactoring
• Characterization of bias in mining and guidelines to ensure quality results
• Privacy and ethics in mining software repositories
• Meta-models, exchange formats, and infrastructure tools to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability
• Empirical studies on extracting data from repositories of large long-lived and/or industrial projects
• Methods of integrating mined data from various historical sources
• Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
• Mining software licensing and copyrights
• Mining execution traces and logs
• Analysis of natural language artifacts in software repositories

Submission

All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE/MSR 2012 Formatting Instructions and must not exceed the page limits (research papers: 10 pages; short papers: 4 pages; challenge reports: 4 pages), including all text, references, appendices and figures. All submissions must be in English and in PDF format.

Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere for the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission.

Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair.

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an IEEE Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the results at the MSR 2012 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings.