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 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.

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
* 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