Collaborative Research: CCRI: ENS: Boa 2.0: Enhancing Infrastructure for Studying Software and its Evolution at a Large Scale

在当今以软件为中心的世界中，超大规模的软件存储库，例如GitHub，每个都有数十万个项目，是新的亚历山大图书馆。它们包含了大量的软件和关于软件的信息。科学家和工程师都对分析这些丰富的信息感兴趣，这既是出于好奇心，也是为了检验重要的研究假设。然而，目前的进入壁垒是令人望而却步的，只有少数具有完善的基础设施和深厚的专业知识的人可以尝试这种超大规模的分析。必要的专业知识包括：以编程方式访问版本控制系统，数据存储和检索，数据挖掘和并行化。需要在这四个不同领域的专业知识显着增加了科学研究的成本，试图回答涉及超大规模软件存储库的研究问题。因此，实验往往是不可复制的，和实验基础设施的可重用性低。此外，由于没有系统的管理，这些实验产生的相关数据经常丢失，无法访问和过时。最后但并非最不重要的是，构建分析基础设施以有效处理超大规模数据可能非常困难。该项目将继续加强CISE研究基础设施，称为Boa，以帮助和协助此类研究。Boa的下一个版本将被称为Boa 2.0，它将继续在全球范围内传播。该项目将进一步开发编程语言，也称为Boa，它可以隐藏科学家和工程师以编程方式访问版本控制系统，数据存储和检索，数据挖掘和并行化的细节，并允许他们专注于程序逻辑。该项目还将增强Boa的数据挖掘基础设施，以及一个包含数百万开源项目的BIGDATA存储库，用于分析超大规模软件存储库，以帮助进行此类实验。该项目将整合Boa 2.0与开放科学中心开放科学框架（OSF），以提高可重复性，并与国家计算资源XSEDE，以提高可扩展性。Boa 2.0的更广泛的影响源于它的潜力，使开发人员，设计人员和研究人员能够构建直观的，多模式的，以用户为中心的科学应用程序，可以帮助和实现对开源软件开发的个人，社会，法律的，政策和技术方面的科学研究。这一进步将主要通过显著降低进入门槛来实现，从而在该领域实现更大和更雄心勃勃的数据密集型科学发现。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估而被认为值得支持。

In today’s software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories, e.g. GitHub, with hundreds of thousands of projects each, are the new library of Alexandria. They contain an enormous corpus of software and information about software. Scientists and engineers alike are interested in analyzing this wealth of information both for curiosity as well as for testing important research hypotheses. However, the current barrier to entry is prohibitive and only a few with well-established infrastructure and deep expertise can attempt such ultra-large-scale analysis. Necessary expertise includes: programmatically accessing version control systems, data storage and retrieval, data mining, and parallelization. The need to have expertise in these four different areas significantly increases the cost of scientific research that attempts to answer research questions involving ultra-large-scale software repositories. As a result, experiments are often not replicable, and reusability of experimental infrastructure low. Furthermore, data associated and produced by such experiments is often lost and becomes inaccessible and obsolete, because there is no systematic curation. Last but not least, building analysis infrastructure to process ultra-large-scale data efficiently can be very hard. This project will continue to enhance the CISE research infrastructure called Boa to aid and assist with such research. This next version of Boa will be called Boa 2.0 and it will continue to be globally disseminated. The project will further develop the programming language also called Boa, that can hide the details of programmatically accessing version control systems, data storage and retrieval, data mining, and parallelization from the scientists and engineers and allow them to focus on the program logic. The project will also enhance the data mining infrastructure for Boa, and a BIGDATA repository containing millions of open source project for analyzing ultra-large-scale software repositories to help with such experiments. The project will integrate Boa 2.0 with the Center for Open Science Open Science Framework (OSF) to improve reproducibility and with the national computing resource XSEDE to improve scalability. The broader impacts of Boa 2.0 stem from its potential to enable developers, designers and researchers to build intuitive, multi-modal, user-centric, scientific applications that can aid and enable scientific research on individual, social, legal, policy, and technical aspects of open source software development. This advance will primarily be achieved by significantly lowering the barrier to entry and thus enabling a larger and more ambitious line of data-intensive scientific discovery in this area.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.