A Mining Software Repository Extended Cookbook: Lessons learned from a literature review

TL;DR

This paper updates the Mining Software Repositories (MSR) Cookbook by conducting a systematic review, expanding its recommendations, and providing lessons learned to guide future research and practice in the field.

Contribution

It presents an extended MSR Cookbook based on a comprehensive review, including new studies, updated recommendations, and practical lessons learned.

Findings

84% increase in comments compared to the original Cookbook

Inclusion of studies from all relevant publication venues

Summarization of tools used for each high-level theme

Abstract

The main purpose of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) is to discover the latest enhancements and provide an insight into how to make improvements in a software project. In light of it, this paper updates the MSR findings of the original MSR Cookbook, by first conducting a systematic mapping study to elicit and analyze the state-of-the-art, and then proposing an extended version of the Cookbook. This extended Cookbook was built on four high-level themes, which were derived from the analysis of a list of 112 selected studies. Hence, it was used to consolidate the extended Cookbook as a contribution to practice and research in the following areas by: 1) including studies published in all available and relevant publication venues; 2) including and updating recommendations in all four high-level themes, with an increase of 84% in comments in this study when compared with the original MSR Cookbook; 3) summarizing the tools employed for each high-level theme; and 4) providing lessons learned for future studies. Thus, the extended Cookbook examined in this work can support new research projects, as upgraded recommendations and the lessons learned are available with the aid of samples and tools.