The Automated Software Engineering Research Group at North Carolina State University is conducting research on mining software engineering data, including open source software engineering data. Since late 90's, various data mining techniques have been applied to analyze software engineering data, and have achieved many noticeable successes. Substantial experience, development, and lessons of data mining for software engineering pose interesting challenges and opportunities for new research and development. Open source software development provides new opportunities for providing abundant software engineering data available for mining (e.g., open source code repositories, version histories, bug repositories, and community data). On the other hand, diversified data available there also pose new challenges. For example, the usage data of the same API from a large number of open source projects may be quite diversified (the same API may be used by different open source projects in very different ways). The bug reports directly submitted by the open source communities could be quite diversified (the same bug may be described by different users in text in very different ways). In addition, the open source communities create social dynamics that may be quite different from the ones created in the traditional software development process. 

Our research group has been helping develop the research area of mining software engineering data. Tao Xie has maintained a comprehensive bibliography on mining software engineering data. He presented tutorials on "Mining Software Engineering Data" at KDD 2006, ICDM 2007, ICSE 2007, ICSE 2008. He co-organized 2007 Dagstuhl Seminar on Mining Programs and Processes. 

We would like to hear from you if you are interested in collaborating with us on any idea in this project. You can contact us by sending email to .

  How is our research work related to software industry?

Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Program Source Code funded by NSF CSR, ARO STIR

The Yangtse Project on Automated Software Testing in the Absence of Specifications

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Project Descriptions:

Mining Open Bug Repositories

Open source development projects typically support an open bug repository such as Bugzilla so that bug reports from all over the world can be gathered. A new report that is submitted to this repository must be triaged to detect a duplicate bug report, reproduce the problem, and assign the bug report to a developer. The current technique used by triagers for detecting duplicate reports is by searching for a target bug that matches the new one. But unfortunately the result is often not satisfying because of the limit of natural language processing. We propose an information-retrieval-based approach that combines execution information and natural language information to detect duplicate bugs more precisely. We also propose approaches for categorizing or clustering new bug reports based on the historical bug report categorization to reduce developers' efforts in categorizing new bug reports.

• [ICSE 2008] Xiaoyin Wang, Lu Zhang, Tao Xie, John Anvik, and Jiasu Sun. An Approach to Detecting Duplicate Bug Reports using Natural Language and Execution Information. To appear in Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, May 2008. [PDF][BibTeX]

Mining Open Source Code Repositories

• Mining API Properties for Bug Finding: A software system interacts with its environment through interfaces. Improper handling of exceptional returns from system interfaces can cause robustness problems. Robustness of software systems are governed by various temporal properties related to interfaces. Static verification has been shown to be effective in checking these temporal properties. But manually specifying these properties is cumbersome and requires the knowledge of interface specifications, which are often either unavailable or undocumented. We propose a framework to automatically infer system-specific interface specifications from program source code written in C. We use a model checker to generate traces related to the interfaces. From these model checking traces, we infer interface specification details such as return value on success or failure. Based on these inferred specifications, we translate generically specified interface robustness rules to concrete robustness properties verifiable by static checking. We implemented our framework for an existing static analyzer called MOPS that employs push-down model checking and apply the analyzer to the well known POSIX-API system interfaces. We have recently developed several Eclipse Plugins based on Google Code Search Engine for inferring API properties for Java code returned from code search engines. These properties are used to find bugs related to neglected conditions and exception handling. More Eclipse Plugins for C, C++, and C# are under development. 

  • [NSFNGS 2008] Tao Xie, Mithun Acharya, Suresh Thummalapenta, and Kunal Taneja. Improving Software Reliability and Productivity via Mining Program Source Code. To appear in Proceedings of the NSF Next Generation Software Program Workshop at IPDPS 2008 (NSFNGS 2008), Miami, Florida, April 2008. [PDF][BibTeX]
  • [NCSU CSC 07] Mithun Acharya and Tao Xie. Static Detection of API Error-Handling Bugs via Mining Source Code. North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science Technical report TR-2007-35, October 15, 2007. [PDF][BibTex]
  • [NCSU CSC 07] Suresh Thummalapenta and Tao Xie. NEGWeb: Static Defect Detection via Searching Billions of Lines of Open Source Code. North Carolina State University Department of Computer Science Technical report TR-2007-24, September 16, 2007. [PDF][BibTex]
  • [ESEC/FSE 2007] Mithun Acharya, Tao Xie, Jian Pei, and Jun Xu. Mining API Patterns as Partial Orders from Source Code: From Usage Scenarios to Specifications. In Proceedings of the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2007), Dubrovnik, Croatia, pp. 25-34, September, 2007. [PDF][BibTeX]
  • [ISSRE 2006] Mithun Acharya, Tao Xie, and Jun Xu. Mining Interface Specifications for Generating Checkable Robustness Properties. In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering  (ISSRE 2006), Raleigh, NC, pp. 311-320, November 2006. [PDF][BibTeX]
  • [ASE 2006] Mithun Acharya, Tanu Sharma, Jun Xu, and Tao Xie. Effective Generation of Interface Robustness Properties for Static Analysis. In Proceedings of the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2006), Short Paper, Tokyo, Japan, pp. 293-296, September 2006. [PDF][BibTeX]

   

• Mining API Usage Patterns for Code Reuse: Modern software industry increasingly relies on third-party libraries and frameworks provided by open source projects. Everyday, programmers cope with these APIs to accomplish their daily work. Unfortunately, most of the APIs are complex and difficult to use. Typically, an API library often provides a large number of methods and classes. For example, Eclipse 3.1 platform SDK provides more than 11,000 classes not to say its large community of plug-in projects. In addition, the APIs provided by different projects follow different styles. Even experienced programmers may encounter problems when they are to use unfamiliar APIs. Due to these difficulties, programmers are often struggling with how to choose proper APIs and how to organize the APIs when the programmers need to use them together to implement a certain feature. We propose to develop techniques and tools for mining API usage patterns out of open source code repositories to help programmers write API client code. We have developed a prototype called MAPO based on code search engines such as Google Code Search Engine. More details can be found in our MSR 2006 paper. We recently developed an Eclipse Plugin version of MAPO, focusing on a fixed set of open source repositories. We also developed another Eclipse Plugin for mining API sequences based on Google Code Search Engine (improving an Eclipse Plugin called Prospector developed at UC Berkeley by mining a large number of open source projects through code search engines). 
  Related Publications: [ESEC/FSE 2007][MSR 2006][ICSE 06 ER]

• [NSFNGS 2008] Tao Xie, Mithun Acharya, Suresh Thummalapenta, and Kunal Taneja. Improving Software Reliability and Productivity via Mining Program Source Code. To appear in Proceedings of the NSF Next Generation Software Program Workshop at IPDPS 2008 (NSFNGS 2008), Miami, Florida, April 2008. [PDF][BibTeX]
• [MSR 2008] Suresh Thummalapenta and Tao Xie. SpotWeb: Detecting Framework Hotspots via Mining Open Source Repositories on the Web. To appear in Proceedings of the 5th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2008), Position Paper, Leipzig, Germany, May 2008. [PDF][BibTeX]
• [ASE 2007] Suresh Thummalapenta and Tao Xie. PARSEWeb: A Programmer Assistant for Reusing Open Source Code on the Web. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2007), Atlanta, Georgia, pp. 204-213, November 2007. [PDF][BibTeX]
• [ESEC/FSE 2007] Mithun Acharya, Tao Xie, Jian Pei, and Jun Xu. Mining API Patterns as Partial Orders from Source Code: From Usage Scenarios to Specifications. In Proceedings of the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2007), Dubrovnik, Croatia, pp. 25-34, September, 2007. [PDF][BibTeX]
• [MSR 2006] Tao Xie and Jian Pei. MAPO: Mining API Usages from Open Source Repositories. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2006), Shanghai, China, pp. 54-57, May 2006. [PDF][BibTeX][Slides]

 

• Mining Test Code for Assisting Developer Testing: When developers build a software system based on third-party open source libraries and frameworks, some class interfaces in the system may have method arguments of non-primitive types from the third-party libraries and frameworks. During automated unit test generation, a test generation tool usually has difficulties in generating meaningful arguments for these non-primitive-types arguments. We propose to mine method sequences that produce objects of the non-primitive types, and use these method sequences to produce meaningful arguments as test data. The high-level, general idea is to exploit the code written by the open source communities to help developers to test the code at hand.
  
  • Yoonki Song, Suresh Thummalapenta, and Tao Xie. UnitPlus: Assisting Developer Testing in Eclipse. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology eXchange Workshop at OOPSLA 2007 (ETX 2007), Montreal, Canada, October 2007. (Best Student Paper Award) [PDF][BibTeX]

   

• Mining Open Source Version Histories: Version control systems such as CVS or SVN track the evolution of source code in a software project. We propose to investigate the evolution of test code and co-evolution of test code and production code.
  

Mining Open Source Community Data

In open source project repositories, archived project communications record rationale for decisions throughout the life of a project. We propose to investigate social dynamics of open source developer or user communities by mining project communications and other types of data for the open source communities.

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Tutorials/Course Modules:

1. Tao Xie. Data Mining III - Text Mining course module. the Master of Science in Analytics (MSA) program, the Institute for Advanced Analytics, North Carolina State University, January-February 2008.
2. Ahmed E. Hassan and Tao Xie. Mining Software Engineering Data. To appear in Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Companion Volume, Tutorials, Leipzig, Germany, May 2008. [Tutorial Web][BibTeX]
3. Chao Liu, Tao Xie, and Jiawei Han. Mining for Software Reliability. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2007), Omaha, NE, October 2007. [Tutorial Web][BibTeX]
4. Tao Xie, Jian Pei, and Ahmed E. Hassan. Mining Software Engineering Data. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2007), Companion Volume, Tutorials, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 172-173, May 2007. [Tutorial Web][PDF][BibTeX]
5. Tao Xie and Jian Pei. Data Mining for Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2006), Tutorial, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, August 2006. [Tutorial Web][Slides][BibTeX]

Presentations:

1. Tao Xie. Recommendation Systems for Code Reuse. Workshop talk, Bellairs Workshop On Software Analysis for Recommendation Systems (SARS 2008), Barbados, February, 2008. [Slides]
2. Suresh Thummalapenta. PARSEWeb: A Programmer Assistant for Reusing Open Source Code on the Web. Conference presentation, the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2007), Atlanta, Georgia, November 2007.
3. Tao Xie. Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Accenture Labs, Chicago, IL, October 2007.
4. Tao Xie. Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Motorola Labs, Schaumburg, IL, October 2007.
5. Tao Xie. Improving Automation in Developer Testing: Achievements and Challenges. Conference talk, International Verify Conference (Verify 2007), Arlington, VA, October 2007. 
6. Suresh Thummalapenta. Exploiting code search engines to improve programmer productivity. Conference ACM SIGPLAN SRC SRC presentation, the 21th Annual ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (Companion) (OOPSLA 2007),  ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition,  Montreal, Canada, October 2006.
7. Tao Xie. Improving Automation in Developer Testing: Achievements and Challenges. Conference talk, Triangle Information Systems Quality Association Conference (TISQA 2007), Chapel Hill, NC, September 2007. 
8. Mithun Acharya. Mining API Patterns as Partial Orders from Source Code: From Usage Scenarios to Specifications. Conference presentation,  the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2007), Dubrovnik, Croatia, September, 2007.
9. Tao Xie. Improving Software Productivity and Quality via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Lane Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, September 2007.
10. Tao Xie. Improving Programmer Productivity via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China, August 2007.
11. Tao Xie. Improving Programmer Productivity via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China, August 2007.
12. Tao Xie. Mining Software Engineering Data. Invited talk, Software Engineering Institute, Peking University, Beijing, China, July 2007.
13. Tao Xie. Improving Programmer Productivity via Mining Program Source Code. Invited talk, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada, May 2007.
14. Mithun Acharya. Mining Interface Specifications for Generating Checkable Robustness Properties. Conference presentation, the 17th IEEE International Conference on Software Reliability Engineering  (ISSRE 2006), Raleigh, NC, November 2006.
15. Mithun Acharya. Automatic Inference of Interface Properties from Program Source Code. Conference doctoral symposium presentation, the 14th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2006), Doctoral Symposium, Portland, Oregon, USA, November 2006
16. Mithun Acharya. Automatic Generation and Inference of Interface Properties from Program Source Code. Conference ACM SIGPLAN SRC SRC presentation, the 20th Annual ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (Companion) (OOPSLA 2006), ACM SIGPLAN Student Research Competition, Portland, Oregon, USA, October 2006.
17. Mithun Acharya. Effective Generation of Interface Robustness Properties for Static Analysis. Conference poster presentation, the 21st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering  (ASE 2006), Tokyo, Japan, September 2006.
18. Mithun Acharya. Automatic Generation of Robustness and Security Properties from Program Source Code. Conference student forum presentation, the IEEE International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2006), Student Forum, Philadelphia, PA, USA, June 2006
19. Tao Xie. Data Mining for Software Engineering. Visit talk, Fudan University, China, May 2006.
20. Tao Xie. MAPO: Mining API Usages from Open Source Repositories. Workshop presentation, the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2006), Shanghai, China, May 2006. [Slides]
    

Software:

1. NEGWeb: Static Defect Detection via Searching Billions of Lines of Open Source Code
2. PARSEWeb: A Programmer Assistant for Reusing Open Source Code on the Web
3. MAPO: Mining API Usages from Open Source Repositories
4. UnitPlus: Assisting Developer Testing in Eclipse

Links:

Bibliography on Mining Software Engineering Data

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Related Research Projects on Open Source Software Development

• Free/Open Source Research Community
• Free/Libre Open Source Software Research at Syracus U.
• Open Source Software Development Project at UC Irvine
• CMU West Center for Open Source Innovation
• Open Source Research at CMU by James D. Herbsleb  Patrick Wagstrom

Related Courses on Open Source Software Development

• CMU Course on Open Source Software Development
• U. Vic course on Open Source Software Development

Related Research Events on Open Source Software Development

• The Third International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2007)
• The Second International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2006)
• The First International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2005)
• Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development Workshop Series/Open Source Software Engineering Workshop Series
• UCI-UIUC-NSF Workshops on the Science of Design: Continuous Design of Open Source Software

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Related Publications: (Software Engineering Conferences) (Software Testing Researchers) Also see Tao Xie's publications.

Research Foundations	Research Subareas
Automated Software Testing (Researchers) Test Generation Test Selection Test Abstraction Test Oracle Augmentation Regression Testing Mining Software Engineering Data (Bibliography/Tutorials) Mining Program Executions Mining Software Repositories  Mining Open Source Software Engineering Data	Software Security Testing and Analysis (Bibliography) Software Security Test Generation Testing and Analysis of Access Control Policies Testing and Analysis of Aspect-Oriented Programs (Researchers) Testing and Analysis of Web Services and Applications (Bibliography) Software Verification Software Evolution and Program Comprehension Dynamic Analysis Static Analysis

 

SPONSORS

National Science Foundation Award CNS-0720641, Computer Systems Research (CSR) Program (08/01/2007-07/31/2008)

Army Research Office Award W911NF-07-1-0431, Short Term Innovative Research (STIR) Program (06/18/2007-03/17/2008)