Mining source code repositories with boa

Abstract

Mining source code has become a common task for researchers and yielded significant benefits for the software engineering community. Mining source code however is a very difficult and time consuming task. The Boa language and infrastructure was designed to ease mining of project and revision metadata. Recently Boa was extended to support mining source code and currently contains source code for over 23k Java projects, including full revision histories. In this demonstration we pose source code mining tasks and give solutions using Boa. We then execute these programs via our web-based infrastructure and show how to easily make the results available for future researchers.