MSR 2017 - International Conference on Mining Software Repositories

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 in planning future development. The goal of this two-day international conference is to advance the science and practice of software engineering via the analysis of data stored in software repositories.
This year, we solicit three types of papers: research, practice, and data. As in previous MSR editions, there will be a Mining Challenge and a special issue of the best MSR papers published in the Empirical Software Engineering journal. For the research and practice papers, we especially encourage submissions that facilitate reproducibility and follow up research by publicly providing data sets and tools. Publicly providing reusable research artifacts (data or tools) is not mandatory, but will strengthen the reproducibility of the research, which is an explicit evaluation criterion.
The Impact and Value of MSR publications
The impact of the MSR conference is similar to a CORE A conference, which is an “excellent conference, and highly respected in a discipline area”. For additional information concerning the impact and value of MSR publications, please consult this document.
Research Papers
Research papers can be short papers (4 pages plus 1 additional page for references) and full papers (10 pages plus 2 additional pages for references). Short research 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 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.
Practice Experiences
MSR encourages the submission of research papers on practice experiences. They should report experiences of applying mining repository algorithms in an industry/open source organization context. They aim at reporting positive or negative experiences of applying known algorithms, but adapting existing algorithms or proposing new algorithms for practical use would be plus.
Reusable Tools
MSR wants to promote and recognize the creation and use of tools that are designed and built not only for a specific research project, but for the MSR community as a whole. Those tools may let researchers focus on specific aspects of research, let their work be more reproducible, lower the barriers to reuse previous research efforts. Therefore, MSR encourages the submission of papers about these tools. These papers can be descriptions of tools built by the authors, that can be used by other researchers, and/or descriptions of use of tools built by others to obtain some specific research results in the area of mining software repositories.
The public availability of the tool and its internal details, its usefulness for other researchers, the measures taken to simplify its installation and use, and the availability of documentation about it should be clearly discussed in the paper. Both long papers, for complete descriptions of mature tools and/or use cases, and short papers, for summaries of promising use cases and tools, will be accepted. The papers will be reviewed both on their academic merits, and on the specific usefulness of the tools, and the experiences described, for the whole MSR community.