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The Fault in Our Stars: Designing Reproducible Large-scale Code Analysis Experiments

Authors Petr Maj, Stefanie Muroya, Konrad Siek, Luca Di Grazia, Jan Vitek

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering
Keywords
  • software
  • mining code repositories
  • source code analysis

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Abstract

Large-scale software repositories are a source of insights for software engineering. They offer an unmatched window into the software development process at scale. Their sheer number and size holds the promise of broadly applicable results. At the same time, that very size presents practical challenges for scaling tools and algorithms to millions of projects. A reasonable approach is to limit studies to representative samples of the population of interest. Broadly applicable conclusions can then be obtained by generalizing to the entire population. The contribution of this paper is a standardized experimental design methodology for choosing the inputs of studies working with large-scale repositories. We advocate for a methodology that clearly lays out what the population of interest is, how to sample it, and that fosters reproducibility. Along the way, we discourage researchers from using extrinsic attributes of projects such as stars, that measure some unclear notion of popularity.

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Petr Maj, Stefanie Muroya, Konrad Siek, Luca Di Grazia, and Jan Vitek. The Fault in Our Stars: Designing Reproducible Large-scale Code Analysis Experiments. In 38th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 313, pp. 27:1-27:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECOOP.2024.27

Author Details

Petr Maj
  • Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
Stefanie Muroya
  • Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), Klosterneuburg, Austria
Konrad Siek
  • Czech Technical University, Prague, Czech Republic
Luca Di Grazia
  • Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), Lugano, Switzerland
Jan Vitek
  • Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
  • Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

Funding

This work was supported by the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports under program ERC-CZ, grant agreement LL2325, BigCode (reg. no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000421). NSF grants CCF-1910850, CNS-1925644, and CCF-2139612, as well as the GACR EXPRO grant 23-07580X.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Digital Ocean for their involuntary contribution of computational resources during the early data gathering phase of our research. We acknoweldge the reviewers of ICSE'22, and thank the reviewers of ECOOP'23 for their encouragments and for sticking around until 2024.

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