Boa: A Language and Infrastructure for Analyzing Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repositories

By: Robert Dyer, Hoan Anh Nguyen, Hridesh Rajan, and Tien N. Nguyen

Abstract

In today’s software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories, e.g. SourceForge (350,000+ projects), GitHub (250,000+ projects), and Google Code (250,000+ projects) are the new library of Alexandria. They contain an enormous corpus of software and information about software. Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information both for curiosity as well as for testing important hypotheses. However, systematic extraction of relevant data from these repositories and analysis of such data for testing hypotheses is hard, and best left for mining software repository (MSR) experts! The goal of Boa, a domain-specific language and infrastructure described here, is to ease testing MSR-related hypotheses. We have implemented Boa and provide a web-based interface to Boa’s infrastructure. Our evaluation demonstrates that Boa significantly reduces programming efforts, thus lowering the barrier to entry. We also see drastic improvements in scalability. Last but not least, reproducing an experiment conducted using Boa is just a matter of re-running small Boa programs provided by previous researchers.

ACM Reference

Dyer, R. et al. 2013. Boa: A Language and Infrastructure for Analyzing Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repositories. 35th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE, San Francisco, USA (2013), 422–431.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{DyerNguyenRajanNguyen2013,
  author = {Robert Dyer and Hoan Anh Nguyen and Hridesh Rajan and Tien N. Nguyen},
  title = {Boa: A Language and Infrastructure for Analyzing Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repositories},
  booktitle = {35th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE, San Francisco, USA},
  pages = {422--431},
  year = {2013},
  publisher = {{IEEE} Computer Society},
  editor = {David Notkin and Betty H. C. Cheng and Klaus Pohl},
  doi = {10.1109/ICSE.2013.6606588},
  abstract = {
  In today's software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories,
  e.g. SourceForge (350,000+ projects), GitHub (250,000+ projects), and Google
  Code (250,000+ projects) are the new library of Alexandria. They contain an
  enormous corpus of software and information about software. Scientists and
  engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information both
  for curiosity as well as for testing important hypotheses. However, systematic
  extraction of relevant data from these repositories and analysis of such data
  for testing hypotheses is hard, and best left for mining software repository
  (MSR) experts! The goal of Boa, a domain-specific language and infrastructure
  described here, is to ease testing MSR-related hypotheses. We have implemented
  Boa and provide a web-based interface to Boa's infrastructure. Our evaluation
  demonstrates that Boa significantly reduces programming efforts, thus lowering
  the barrier to entry. We also see drastic improvements in scalability. Last
  but not least, reproducing an experiment conducted using Boa is just a matter
  of re-running small Boa programs provided by previous researchers.},
}