[ecoop-info] CfP: MSR 2012 - 9th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

[Alberto Bacchelli]

CALL FOR PAPERS

MSR 2012 - 9th International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories

June 2-3 2012, Zurich, Switzerland (co-located with ICSE 2012)

http://2012.msrconf.org/
twitter: @msrconf

Sponsored by IEEE TCSE and ACM SIGSOFT.

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 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 (EMSE) edited by
Springer.

In the Mining Challenge, we invite researchers to demonstrate the
usefulness of their mining tools on preselected software repositories
and summarize their findings in a challenge report (4 pages). This
year, the challenge is on the Android platform. We provide the change
and bug report data for the Android platform and you should use your
brain, tools, computational power, and magic to uncover interesting
findings related to the Android platform.

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-driven software development, 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
- Characterization of bias in mining and guidelines to ensure quality results
- Privacy and ethics in mining software repositories
- Meta-models, exchange formats, and infrastructure tools to
facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and
repeatability
- Empirical studies on extracting data from repositories of large
long-lived and/or industrial projects
- Methods of integrating mined data from various historical sources
- Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
- Mining software licensing and copyrights
- Mining execution traces and logs
- Analysis of natural language artifacts in software repositories

IMPORTANT DATES

Abstract:               Feb 06, 2012
Research/short papers:  Feb 10, 2012
Challenge papers:       Mar 02, 2012
Author notification:    Mar 16, 2012
Camera-ready copy:      Mar 29, 2012

Note: All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM (Apia, Samoa Time) on the
dates indicated.

SUBMISSION

All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE/MSR 2012
Formatting Instructions
(http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/icse2012/how-to-submit/) and must not exceed
the page limits (research papers: 10 pages; short papers: 4 pages;
challenge reports: 4 pages), including all text, references,
appendices and figures. All submissions must be in English and in PDF
format.

Papers submitted for consideration should not have been published
elsewhere and should not be under review or submitted for review
elsewhere for the duration of consideration. ACM plagiarism policies
and procedures shall be followed for cases of double submission
(http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/plagiarism_policy).

Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair
(http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msr2012).

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will
be asked to complete an IEEE Copyright form and will receive further
instructions for preparing their camera ready versions. At least one
author of each paper is expected to present the results at the MSR
2012 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the
conference electronic proceedings.

ORGANIZATION

General Chair:
Michele Lanza, University of Lugano, Switzerland

Program Co-chairs:
Massimiliano Di Penta, University of Sannio, Italy
Tao Xie, North Carolina State University, USA

Challenge Chair:
Emad Shihab, Queen's University, Canada

Web Chair:
Alberto Bacchelli, University of Lugano, Switzerland

Program Committee, Challenge Committee, and Steering Committee:
See http://2012.msrconf.org/