MSR 2014 call for papers

******************************************************************************************************
MSR 2014 - 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories
May 31- June 1, 2014. Hyderabad, India
http://msrconf.org

Co-located with the 36th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software
Engineering (ICSE 2014)

Sponsored by IEEE TCSE and ACM SIGSOFT

Follow MSR on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/msrconf
and Twitter: @msrconf
*******************************************************************************************************

HIGHLIGHTS in 2014!

Data papers for presenting data sets curated by researchers and
made available to the MSR community

Practice papers for experiences of applying mining repository
algorithms in industry/open source organization

Mining Challenge with the GibHub data from 90 software projects

IMPORTANT DATES

Research/Practice abstracts: Jan 31, 2014
Research/Practice papers: Feb 7, 2014
Data papers: Feb 21, 2014
Challenge papers: Feb 21, 2014
Author notification: Mar 10, 2014

All submission deadlines are 11:59 PM (Pago Pago, American Samoa) on the dates indicated.

CALL FOR PAPERS

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 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.

This year, we will solicit three tracks of papers: research, practice,
and data. As in previous MSR editions, there will be a Mining
Challenge and a special issue of best MSR papers in the Springer
Empirical Software Engineering journal.

For the research and practice papers, we especially encourage submissions
that facilitate reproducibility and follow-up research by publicly
providing data sets and tools. Publicly providing reusable research
artifacts (data or tools) is not mandatory, but will strengthen the
reproducibility of the research, which is an explicit evaluation
criterion.

Research papers:
Research papers can be short papers (4 pages) and full papers (10
pages). Short research 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.

Practice papers:
Practice papers should report experiences of applying mining
repository algorithms in an industry/open source organization context.
Practice papers aim at reporting positive or negative experiences of
applying known algorithms, but adapting existing algorithms or
proposing new algorithms for practical use would be plus. Practice
papers also can be short papers (4 pages) and full papers (10 pages).

Data papers:
We want to encourage researchers to share their data. Data papers
should describe data sets curated by their authors and made available
to others. They are expected to be at most 4 pages long and should
address the following: description of the data, including its source;
methodology used to gather it; description of the schema used to store
it, and any limitations and/or challenges of this data set. The data
should be made available at the time of submission of the paper for
review, but will be considered confidential until publication of the
paper.

Mining challenge:
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). In 2014
the Mining Challenge is with GitHub from 90 software projects.

EMSE special issue:
A selection of the best research papers will be invited for
consideration in a special issue of the Springer journal Empirical
Software Engineering (EMSE).

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

SUBMISSION

All papers must conform at time of submission to the ICSE/MSR 2014
Formatting Instructions and must not exceed the page limits
(research/practice papers: 10 pages; short papers: 4 pages; data
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.

Papers must be submitted electronically through EasyChair using the
following URL: http://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=msr2014

Upon notification of acceptance, all authors of accepted papers will
be asked to complete a 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
2014 conference. All accepted contributions will be published in the
conference electronic proceedings.

For more details visit the MSR 2014 web-site: http://msrconf.org

Best regards,
Sunghun Kim and Martin Pinzger
MSR 2014 Program Co-chairs