CRII: SHF: Automatic Building of Software Projects to Support Analysis of Open Software Repositories

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As more and more software developers choose to host their projects at open software repositories such as Sourceforge and Github, these large repositories have become valuable resources for the development of novel software engineering techniques. They can serve as either data sets for the emerging mining-based software-engineering techniques or subjects for experimental evaluations and empirical studies. However, a major obstacle preventing full utilization of open software repositories is that, while many existing program analysis tools require successfully built projects as their input, software projects typically have only their source code stored in the repositories, and the source code often cannot be built automatically. Therefore, it is often difficult to apply existing program analysis tools to a large number of software projects, which limits the benefit provided by large open software repositories. This research project aims to overcome the above obstacle by providing technique for automatic building of software projects in open software repositories. Specifically, the project mainly explores the following directions: (1) analyzing path expressions and file flows in build configuration files to provide proper parameters and environment variables for build configuration tools (2) resolving missing software dependencies by searching online dependency repositories, and identifying the compatible software dependency files among the search results; and (3) assigning a software project to an appropriate building platform according to its features. The project helps to discover knowledge on the feasibility and effectiveness of automatic software building, and may benefit a large variety of software engineering techniques that take advantage of open software repositories.