Many research groups in the field of Software Engineering create wonderful tools for analysing source code and various other aspects of software projects, such as tools for identifying design smells and tools for analysing security vulnerabilities. However, building on each other's tools and replicating studies with other group's tools remains very challenging. The challenge we aim to tackle in this project is to design and build a Platform for Software Analytics. Ideally, this infrastructure provides a platform for the worldwide community of Software Analytics researchers. This platform should allow the analysis of large volumes of software development projects using transparent and repeatable workflows
. For example, researchers in software evolution could define a workflow that extracts key complexity metrics as well as team-activity metrics and study how these evolve over time. A vision for such an infrastructure is described in this paper:
T. Ho-Quang, M. R. V. Chaudron, G. Robles, G. B. Herwanto: Towards an infrastructure for empirical research into software architecture: challenges and directions. ECASE@ICSE 2019.
- Are you eager to contribute to creating better tooling for doing software science?
- Are you fascinated by developing interoperable software analysis tools?
- Are you passionate about usability of software development environments?
Job Description The main aim of this project is to develop a common platform for Software Analytics. Key building capabilities that this platform needs to offer are: access to large volumes of software engineering data (e.g. via libaries.io, Software Heritage), a common data-model for various software engineering artefacts that enables interoperability between tools, and tools for visualizing the results of software analysis workflows. For this, we will explore which frameworks and platforms are around - such as
Galaxy.
You will be part of the Software Engineering and Technology (SET) Research group at Eindhoven University, and your supervisor will be Prof. Dr. Michel Chaudron. The SET group has an excellent track record in performing empirical studies in the field of software analytics. Moreover, SET offers a welcoming, international working environment, where English is the working-language.
This project aims to cater for both the national and ideally also for the international community in software analytics.