Model-based mining of source code repositories

Abstract

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field analyzes the rich data available in source code repositories (SCR) to uncover interesting and actionable information about software system evolution. Major obstacles in MSR are the heterogeneity of software projects and the amount of data that is processed. Model-driven software engineering (MDSE) can deal with heterogeneity by abstraction as its core strength, but only recent efforts in adopting NoSQL-databases for persisting and processing very large models made MDSE a feasible approach for MSR. This paper is a work in progress report on srcrepo: a model-based MSR system. Srcrepo uses the NoSQL-based EMF-model persistence layer EMF-Fragments and Eclipse’s MoDisco reverse engineering framework to create EMF-models of whole SCRs that comprise all code of all revisions at an abstract syntax tree (AST) level. An OCL-like language is used as an accessible way to finally gather information such as software metrics from these SCR models.