Guest Editorial: Special section on mining software repositories

Romain Robbes, Emily Hill, Christian Bird
2018 Empirical Software Engineering  
Developers use a variety of software tools in order to develop software systems. In turn, these tools record this usage in software repositories. The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field analyzes the rich data available in software repositories to uncover interesting and actionable information about software systems and their developers. Some commonly explored areas include software evolution, models of software development processes, characterization of developers and their activities,
more » ... iction of future software qualities, use of machine learning techniques on software project data, software defect prediction, analysis of software change patterns, and analysis of code clones. This special issue highlights six recent MSR regular research papers, and one data showcase paper. The goal of data showcase papers is to describe at length a valuable Software Engineering dataset, in the hope that it allows prospective users of these datasets a smooth start with them. The paper "The Impact of Rapid Release Cycles on the Integration Delay of Fixed Issues" by Alencar da Costa, McIntosh, Treude, Kulesza, and Hassan, presents a mixedmethod study: a quantitative study of the Firefox project, followed up by a qualitative survey of 37 open-source contributors. The study finds that, contrary to common knowledge, adopting a rapid release cycle may not result in issues being integrated more quickly than when using a more traditional release process. The study then explores the possible reasons for this observation.
doi:10.1007/s10664-018-9612-y fatcat:s7hqgnzb3zbdhpxnwy3d5japum