Candoia: A Platform and an Ecosystem for Building and Deploying Versatile Mining Software Repositories Tools

Research on mining software repositories (MSR) has shown great
promise during the last decade in solving many challenging software
engineering problems. There exists, however, a ‘valley of death’
between these significant innovations in the MSR research and their
deployment in practice. The significant cost of converting a prototype
to software; need to provide support for a wide variety of tools
and technologies e.g. CVS, SVN, Git, Bugzilla, Jira, Issues, etc,
to improve applicability; and the high cost of customizing tools to
practitioner-specific settings are some key hurdles in transition to
practice. We describe Candoia, a platform and an ecosystem that
is aimed at bridging this valley of death between innovations in
MSR research and their deployment in practice. We have implemented
Candoia and provide facilities to build and publish MSR
ideas as Candoia apps. Our evaluation demonstrates that Candoia
drastically reduces the cost of converting an idea to an app, thus
reducing the barrier to transitioning research findings into practice.
We also see versatility, in Candoia app’s ability to work with a variety
of tools and technologies that the platform supports. Finally,
we find that customizing Candoia app to fit project-specific needs
is often well within the grasp of developers.