DepMiner: A Pipelineable Tool for Mining of Intra-Project Dependencies

TL;DR

DepMiner is an open-source, language-agnostic tool designed for mining detailed intra-project dependencies from source code, facilitating large-scale analysis and integration into software engineering research pipelines.

Contribution

It introduces a flexible, extensible tool that leverages static analysis from IDEs to extract intra-project dependencies suitable for research and large-scale analysis.

Findings

Supports multiple programming languages

Easily integrates into existing pipelines

Extensible for various analysis granularities

Abstract

Dependency analysis is recognized as an important field of software engineering due to a variety of reasons. There exists a large pool of tools providing assistance to software developers and architects. Analysis of inter- and intra-project dependencies can help provide various insights about the entire development process. There is, however, currently a lack of tools that would support researchers by extracting intra-project dependencies data in a format most suited for further analysis. In this paper we introduce DepMiner - an open source, language-agnostic tool for mining detailed dependencies data from source code, based on extensive static analysis capabilities of an industry standard IDE. DepMiner can be easily integrated into arbitrary mining pipelines to conduct large-scale source code processing jobs involving intra-project dependencies. It is easily extensible to support other languages of source code, different granularities of analysis, and other use-specific needs.