Tools and methods for large scale empirical software engineering research

Abstract

In this thesis, we investigate novel ways to integrate process and product data fromvarious oss repositories in an effort to build an open Software Engineering ResearchPlatform (serp) consisting of both software tools and shared data. We base our workon sqo-oss, a tool designed to perform software quality analysis. We analyse the designof the raw data and metadata storage formats and as part of its implementation,we develop novel solutions to the problems of: (i) representing distributed and centralisedsource configuration management data in relational format (ii) identifying andresolving developer identities across data sources, and (iii) efficiently representing anddistributing processing workload towards fully exploiting the available hardware