Repositories with Public Data about Software Development

Empirical research on software development based on data obtained from project repositories and code forges is increasingly gaining attention in the software engineering research community. The studies in this area typically start by retrieving or monitoring some subset of data found in the repository or forge, and this data is later analyzed to find interesting patterns. However, retrieving information from these locations can be a challenging task. Meta-repositories providing public information about software development are useful tools that can simplify and streamline the research process. Public data repositories that collect and clean the data from other project repositories or code forges can help ensure that research studies are based on good quality data. This paper provides some insight as to how these meta-repositories (sometimes called a “repository of repositories”, RoR) of data about open source projects should be used to help researchers. This paper describes in detail two of the most widely used collections of data about software development: FLOSSmole and FLOSSMetrics.