EAGER: Boa: A Community Research Infrastructure for Mining Software Repositories

在今天以软件为中心的世界里，超大规模的软件存储库，例如SourceForge（350,000+项目），GitHub（250,000+项目）和谷歌Code（250,000+项目）是亚历山大的新图书馆。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，既是出于好奇，也是为了检验重要的研究假设。然而，目前的进入门槛往往是令人望而却步的，只有少数拥有完善的研究基础设施和深厚的挖掘软件库专业知识的人才可以尝试这种超大规模的实验。一个名为Boa的设施已经原型化：一个特定于领域的语言和一个包含700,000多个开源项目的BIGDATA存储库，用于分析超大规模的软件存储库，以帮助进行此类实验。这个实验性的研究基础设施引起了广泛的软件工程和编程语言研究人员的极大兴趣。这个EAGER项目的主要目标是检查使Boa广泛适用于软件工程和编程语言社区的需求，与一组初始研究人员合作，试图满足这些需求，并采取初步步骤，使Boa成为一个社区可持续的、可扩展的和可扩展的研究基础设施。这是一个有能力和变革性的项目。它的成功将有助于并加速软件工程的科学研究，使科学家和工程师能够专注于基本任务。这一进展将主要通过大幅降低进入门槛来实现，从而在该领域实现更大、更雄心勃勃的数据密集型科学发现。

In today's software-centric world, ultra-large-scale software repositories, e.g. SourceForge (350,000+ projects), GitHub (250,000+ projects), and Google Code (250,000+ projects) 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 often prohibitive and only a few with well-established research infrastructure and deep expertise in mining software repositories can attempt such ultra-large-scale experiments.A facility called Boa has been prototyped: a domain-specific language and a BIGDATA repository containing 700,000+ open source projects for analyzing ultra-large scale software repositories to help with such experiments.This experimental research infrastructure is of significant interest to a wide community of software engineering and programming language researchers. The main goal of this EAGER project is to examine the requirements for making Boa broadly available to the software engineering and programming language community, to work with an initial set of researchers to try to fulfill these requirements, and to take preliminary steps toward making Boa a community-sustained, scalable, and extensible research infrastructure. This is an enabling and transformative project. Its success will aid and accelerate scientific research in software engineering, allowing scientists and engineers to focus on the essential tasks. 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.