A platform for software engineering research

Abstract

Research in the fields of software quality, maintainability and evolution requires the analysis of large quantities of data, which often originate from open source software projects. Collecting and preprocessing data, calculating metrics, and synthesizing composite results from a large corpus of project artifacts is a tedious and error prone task lacking direct scientific value. The Alitheia Core tool is an extensible platform for software quality analysis that is designed specifically to facilitate software engineering research on large and diverse data sources, by integrating data collection and preprocessing phases with an array of analysis services, and presenting the researcher with an easy to use extension mechanism. Alitheia Core aims to be the basis of an ecosystem of shared tools and research data that will enable researchers to focus on their research questions at hand, rather than spend time on re-implementing analysis tools. In this paper, we present the Alitheia Core platform in detail and demonstrate its usefulness in mining software repositories by guiding the reader through the steps required to execute a simple experiment.