A Survey of Techniques in Software Repository Mining

Digital records of software-engineering work are left by software developers during the development process. Source code is usually kept in a software repository, and software developers use issue-tracking repositories and online project-tracking software, as well as informal documentation to support their activities. The research discipline of mining software repositories (MSR) uses these extant, digital repositories to gain understanding of the system. MSR has not been applied to model-driven development or model-driven engineering (MDE). In particular, model management deserve particular attention. Model management covers challenges associated with “maintaining traceability links among model elements to support model evolution and roundtrip engineering”, “tracking versions”, and “using models during runtime”. These problems can be addressed by investigating the models themselves and their relationship to other artifacts using MSR. The objective of this report is to survey state-of-the-art research in MSR and to discuss how these MSR techniques are applicable to the problems faced in MDE. Extracting information about what factors affect model quality, how people interact with models in the repository, and traceability to other artifacts advance our understanding of software engineering when MDE is used.