MSR 2012 - 9th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories MSR 2012

Software repositories such as source control systems, archived communications between project personnel, and defect tracking systems are used to help manage the progress of software projects. Software practitioners and researchers are recognizing the benefits of mining this information to support the maintenance of software systems, improve software design/reuse, and empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. Research is now proceeding to uncover the ways in which mining these repositories can help to understand software development and software evolution, to support predictions about software development, and to exploit this knowledge concretely in planning future development.

The goal of this two-day working conference is to advance the science and practice of software engineering via the analysis of data stored in software repositories.

We solicit short papers (4 pages) and research papers (10 pages). Short papers should discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Accepted short papers will present their ideas in poster form during a poster session at the conference, and in a short lightning talk. Full research papers are expected to describe new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers. Accepted full papers will present their ideas in a research talk at the conference. A selection of the best research papers will be invited for consideration in a special issue of the Springer journal Empirical Software Engineering.

In the Mining Challenge, we invite researchers to demonstrate the usefulness of their mining tools on preselected software repositories and summarize their findings in a challenge report (4 pages).

The conference is sponsored by ACM SIGSOFT and IEEE TCSE.
Proceedings will be published by ACM.
Topics

Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:
Analysis of software ecosystems and mining of repositories across multiple projects
Models for social and development processes that occur in large software projects
Prediction of future software qualities via analysis of software repositories
Models of software project evolution based on historical repository data
Characterization, classification, and prediction of software defects based on analysis of software repositories
Techniques to model reliability and defect occurrences
Search-based software engineering, including search techniques to assist developers in finding suitable components and code fragments for reuse, and software search engines
Analysis of change patterns and trends to assist in future development
Visualization techniques and models of mined data
Techniques and tools for capturing new forms of data for storage in software repositories, such as effort data, fine-grained changes, and refactoring
Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
Characterization of bias in mining and guidelines to ensure quality results
Privacy and ethics in mining software repositories
Meta-models, exchange formats, and infrastructure tools to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability
Case studies on extracting data from repositories of large long-lived and/or industrial projects
Methods of integrating mined data from various historical sources
Submission

Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review elsewhere during the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission.

All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE (and MSR) 2011 Format and Submission Guidelines and must not exceed the page limits (research papers: 10 pages; short papers: 4 pages; challenge reports: 4 pages), including all text, references, appendices and figures. All submissions must be in English. Submissions must be in PDF format.

Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair.

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will be asked to complete an ACM Copyright form and will receive further instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one author of each paper is expected to present the results at the MSR 2011 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the conference electronic proceedings.

http://www.msrconf.org/