More Effective Software Repository Mining

Abstract

Background: Data mining and analyzing of public Git so ware repositories is a growing research field. e tools used for studies that investigate a single project or a group of projects have been refined, but it is not clear whether the results obtained on such "convenience samples" generalize. Aims: is paper aims to elucidate the difficulties faced by researchers who would like to ascertain the generalizability of their findings by introducing an interface that addresses the issues with obtaining representative samples. Results: To do that we explore how to exploit the World of Code system to make so ware repository sampling and analysis much more accessible. Specifically, we present a resource for Mining So ware Repository researchers that is intended to simplify data sampling and retrieval workflow and, through that, increase the validity and completeness of data. Conclusions: is system has the potential to provide researchers a resource that greatly eases the difficulty of data retrieval and addresses many of the currently standing issues with data sampling.

The penumbra of open source: projects outside of centralized platforms are longer maintained, more academic and more collaborative

“…Unfortunately, git commit data does not disambiguate usernames. Past work [16,42] has attempted to disambiguate authors based on a combination of their commit names and commit email addresses, but we considered this out of scope for our work. By not applying identity disambiguation to either the Penumbra or GitHub repositories, the use of emails-as-proxy is consistent across both samples.…”