Premkumar T. Devanbu
(U. of California -- Davis, USA)
Daniel German
(U. of Victoria, Canada)
Mike Godfrey
(U of Waterloo, Canada)
Ric Holt
(U. of Waterloo, Canada)
Shih-Kun Huang
(National Chiao Tung U., Taiwan)
Jane Huffman Hayes
(U. of Kentucky, USA)
Katsuro Inoue
(Osaka U., Japan)
Michele Lanza
(U. Lugano, Switzerland)
Tim Lethbridge
(Ottawa U., Canada)
Jonathan Maletic
(Kent State U., USA)
Ken-ichi Matsumoto
(NAIST, Japan)
Audris Mockus
(Avaya Labs, USA)
Leon Moonen
(Delft U. of Technology, Netherlands)
Thomas J. Ostrand
(AT&T Labs, USA)
Dewayne Perry
(U. of Texas, USA)
Jelber Sayyad Shirabad
(Ottawa U., Canada)
Alexandru Telea
(Eindhoven U. of Technology, Netherlands)
Kenny Wong
(U. of Alberta, Canada)
Annie Ying
(IBM Research, USA)
Thomas Zimmermann
(Saarland U., Germany)

Location

Co-located with ICSE 2006,
Shanghai, China

Overview

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 beginning to recognize the potential benefit 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, to support predictions about software development, and to plan various aspects of software projects.

The goal of this two-day workshop is to establish a community of researchers and practitioners who are working to recover and use the data stored in software repositories to further understanding of software development practices. We expect the presentations and discussions at MSR 2006 in China to continue on a number of general themes and challenges from the previous workshops held at ICSE 2004 in Europe and ICSE 2005 in the US.

We solicit short position papers (4 pages) and research papers (8 pages). Short papers will be expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed, while full papers will be expected to describe new research results, and have a higher degree of technical rigor than short papers. The papers must be in ACM 2-column format. Authors need to indicate their intent to submit a paper by 25th January 2006 - the title of the paper and abstract will need to be submitted online. The full paper should be submitted online by 1st February 2006 as PDF. Notification of acceptance will be sent by 1st March 2006. The final version of the paper is due on 14th March 2006. Accepted papers will be published as part of the ICSE 2006 proceedings. Authors of selected papers will be invited to extend their submission for publication in a special issue of Empirical Software Engineering - an international journal by Springer-Verlag.

Topics

Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited to the following:

• Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
• Quality aspects and guidelines to ensure quality results in mining
• Proposals for exchange formats, meta-models, and infrastructure tools to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability
• Models for social and development processes that occur in large software projects
• Search techniques to assist developers in finding suitable components for reuse
• Techniques to model reliability and defect occurrences
• Analysis of change patterns to assist in future development
• Case studies on extracting data from repositories of large long lived projects
• Other interesting and novel applications of mined data

In addition to the MSR paper track we invite researchers or research groups to participate in the MSR Challenge to apply their prototype mining tools on two common case studies that can be seen as OSS mining benchmarks: PostgreSQL and ArgoUML. Both software systems are large in size, several years mature, multi-platform, intensively used, and provide lots of data for many kinds of mining tools. The challenge for the mining community is to use one of the case studies and run their tool on it and report on their findings in a short presentation at the workshop. In this way, both the applicability of tools and the level of results obtainable can be shown by the challenge participants. More information about the requirements and possibilities for the MSR Challenge are available on the MSR Challenge webpage.