Using Pig as a data preparation language for large-scale mining software repositories studies: An experience report

TitleUsing Pig as a data preparation language for large-scale mining software repositories studies: An experience report
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2012
AuthorsShang, W, Adams, B, Hassan, AE
Secondary TitleJournal of Systems and Software
Volume85
Issue10
Pagination2195 - 2204
Date Published10/2012
ISSN Number01641212
Keywordsflossmole cited
Abstract

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field analyzes software repository data to uncover knowledge and assist development of ever growing, complex systems. However, existing approaches and platforms for MSR analysis face many challenges when performing large-scale MSR studies. Such approaches and platforms rarely scale easily out of the box. Instead, they often require custom scaling tricks and designs that are costly to maintain and that are not reusable for other types of analysis. We believe that the web community has faced many of these software engineering scaling challenges before, as web analyses have to cope with the enormous growth of web data. In this paper, we report on our experience in using a web-scale platform (i.e., Pig) as a data preparation language to aid large-scale MSR studies. Through three case studies, we carefully validate the use of this web platform to prepare (i.e., Extract, Transform, and Load, ETL) data for further analysis. Despite several limitations, we still encourage MSR researchers to leverage Pig in their large-scale studies because of Pig's scalability and flexibility. Our experience report will help other researchers who want to scale their analyses.

Notes

"For example, FLOSSMole (Howison et al., 2006) is a public relational database that contains data extracted from a large number of software repositories. Many researchers use FLOSSMole as a platform. For example, Herraiz et al. (2008) used data in FLOSSMole (Howison et al., 2006) to perform analysis to illustrate that most of the software projects are governed by short term goals rather than long term goals."

URLhttp://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121211002007
DOI10.1016/j.jss.2011.07.034
Short TitleJournal of Systems and Software
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