Boa: Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repository and Source-Code Mining

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, GitHub, and Google Code, are the new library of Alexandria. They contain an enormous corpus of software and related information. Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information. However, systematic extraction and analysis of relevant data from these repositories for testing hypotheses is hard, and best left for mining software repository (MSR) experts! Specifically, mining source code yields significant insights into software development artifacts and processes. Unfortunately, mining source code at a large-scale remains a difficult task. Previous approaches had to either limit the scope of the projects studied, limit the scope of the mining task to be more coarse-grained, or sacrifice studying the history of the code. In this paper we address mining source code: a) at a very large scale; b) at a fine-grained level of detail; and c) with full history information. To address these challenges, we present domain-specific language features for source code mining in our language and infrastructure called Boa. The goal of Boa is to ease testing MSR-related hypotheses. Our evaluation demonstrates that Boa substantially reduces programming efforts, thus lowering the barrier to entry. We also show drastic improvements in scalability.

Other Info

This technical report was later published in TOSEM ‘15.

ACM Reference

Dyer, R. et al. 2015. Boa: Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repository and Source-Code Mining. Technical Report #15-08. Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science.

BibTeX Reference

@techreport{dyer2015boa-a,
   author = {Dyer, Robert and Nguyen, Hoan Anh and Rajan, Hridesh and Nguyen, Tien N.},
   title = {Boa: Ultra-Large-Scale Software Repository and Source-Code Mining},
   number = {15-08},
   month = {dec},
   year = {2015},
   institution = {Iowa State University, Dept. of Computer Science},
   abstract = {
     In today’s software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories,
     e.g. SourceForge, GitHub, and Google Code, are the new library of Alexandria.
     They contain an enormous corpus of software and related information.
     Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of
     information. However, systematic extraction and analysis of relevant data from
     these repositories for testing hypotheses is hard, and best left for mining
     software repository (MSR) experts! Specifically, mining source code yields
     significant insights into software development artifacts and processes.
     Unfortunately, mining source code at a large-scale remains a difficult task.
     Previous approaches had to either limit the scope of the projects studied,
     limit the scope of the mining task to be more coarse-grained, or sacrifice
     studying the history of the code. In this paper we address mining source code:
     a) at a very large scale; b) at a fine-grained level of detail; and c) with
     full history information. To address these challenges, we present
     domain-specific language features for source code mining in our language and
     infrastructure called Boa. The goal of Boa is to ease testing MSR-related
     hypotheses. Our evaluation demonstrates that Boa substantially reduces
     programming efforts, thus lowering the barrier to entry. We also show drastic
     improvements in scalability.
   }
}