MSR Mining Challenge 2006

   
Call for
Participation (PDF)
May 23, 2006
Shanghai, China
Special track within MSR 2006
Co-located with ICSE 2006
IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering
   

Quick Links:

   Challenge Demo
   MSR Program
   Important Dates
   Google discussion and data sharing list
   MSR 2006 Website

Organizers

Martin Pinzger (Chair)
(pinzger at ifi dot unizh.ch)
Harald Gall
(gall at ifi dot unizh.ch)
Department of Informatics
University of Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland

Michele Lanza
(michele dot lanza at unisi.ch)
Marco D'Ambros
(marco dot dambros at lu dot unisi.ch)
Faculty of Informatics University of Lugano,
Lugano, Switzerland

Overview

This year's International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2006) will host a software repositories mining challenge. The MSR Mining Challenge brings together researchers and practitioners who are interested in applying, comparing, and challenging their mining tools and approaches on software repositories for two common open source projects: PostgreSQL and ArgoUML.

The input data sources for the challenge comprise: source code releases, source control data, bug data, mailing lists, execution traces, design and project documentation. The basic data sources of both open source projects are available online and can be downloaded from the projects web sites. For PostgreSQL go to http://www.postgresql.org. The ArgoUML developer team provided us with a full copy of their recent cvs repository that you can download from our server using this link argouml.tar.gz (thanks to the tigris and ArgoUML team). Further project data of ArgoUML is available on http://argouml.tigris.org.

Challenge Demo

Challenge demos are 20 minutes with 15 minutes demo and 5 minutes discussion. Presenters should note that the purpose of the challenge demo is to show how their tool can be used to answer the research questions addressed in the challenge report. Both, the report and the demo will be used to determine the winners of the challenge. The schedule for the demos is included in the MSR workshop program.

Furthermore, we would like to encourage all challenge attendees to demo their tool in the informal demo session on Monday from 3pm - 4:20pm or during cafe breaks.

Research Questions

Research questions addressed in the challenge must be in the following mining areas:

  • Bug (defect) analysis and prediction
  • Change impact, propagation, and coupling analysis
  • Architecture and design quality analysis
  • Process analysis
  • Team structure and interaction analysis

Participation

Participating in the challenge is straight forward:

  1. Select your OSS project
  2. Select your mining area
  3. Get the available project data
  4. Formulate your mining questions
  5. Use your tool(s) to answer them
  6. Write up and submit your challenge report

Since many mining approaches require advanced extraction techniques to process the basic data sources, participants are encouraged to collaborate by sharing extracted data and co-authoring their reports. To facilitate and encourage the sharing of extracted repository data and early results, a dedicated discussion list has been established that is free to join and use.

Submission Details

The challenge report describes the results of your work. The reports should cover the following aspects: Questions addressed, input data, approach and tools used, derived results and interpretation of them, and conclusions. Reports should be at most 2 pages long and in ACM 2-columns format.

Report submission is via email to: msrchallenge06 at msr dot uwaterloo.ca.

Reports are due on February 24, 2006 (Apia Time). Each report will undergo a thorough review and accepted challenge reports will be published in the ACM digital library as part of the MSR 2006 proceedings. The authors of accepted papers will be invited to give a presentation and live demo on-site at the MSR workshop in the special MSR Challenge track.

For more details send email to: msrchallenge06 at msr dot uwaterloo.ca.

Important Dates

  • Challenge reports due: February 24, 2006
  • Author Notifications: March 6, 2006
  • Camera-ready version due: March 14, 2006 (firm!)