Boa Views: Easy Modularization and Sharing of MSR AnalysesMSR - Technical Paper
Mining Software Repositories (MSR) has recently seen a focus toward ultra-large-scale datasets. Several tools exist to support these efforts, such as the Boa language and infrastructure. While Boa has seen extensive use, in its current form it is not always possible to perform the entire analysis task within the infrastructure, often requiring some post-processing in another language. This limits end-to-end reproducibility and limits sharing/re-use of MSR queries. To address this problem, we use the notion of views from the relational database field and designed a query language and runtime infrastructure extension for Boa that we call materialized views. Materialized views provide output reuse to Boa users, so that the results of prior Boa queries can be easily reused by others. This allows for computing results not previously possible within Boa and provides for increased sharing and reuse of MSR queries. To evaluate views, we performed two partial reproductions of prior MSR studies utilizing Boa’s dataset and infrastructure with Boa and compare our results to the prior studies. This shows the usability of the new infrastructure, allowing analyses in Boa that were not previously possible as well as providing a previously hand created gold dataset for identifier splitting as a reusable view for other MSR researchers. We also verified the caching behavior using the queries from one of the case studies. The results show that caching works as expected and can drastically improve the runtime performance.