Tools in Mining Software Repositories

Mining software repositories (MSR) is an important area of research. An international workshop on MSR has been established under the umbrella of international conference on software engineering (ICSE) in year 2004. The quality papers received and presented in the workshop has led to initiate full-fledged conference which purely focuses on issues related to mining software engineering data since 2007. This paper is the result of reviewing all the papers published in the proceedings of the conferences on Mining Software Repositories (MSR) and in other related conference/journals. We have analyzed the papers that contained experimental analysis of software projects related to data mining in software engineering. We have identified the data sets, techniques and tools used/ developed/ proposed in these papers. More than half of the papers are involved in the task accomplished by building or using the data mining tools to mine the software engineering data. It is apparent from the results obtained by analyzing these papers that MSR authors process the raw data which in general publicly available. We categorizes different tools used in MSR on the basis of newly developed, traditional data mining tools, prototype developed and scripts. We have shown the type of mining task that has been performed by using these tools along with the datasets used in these studies.