Mining software repositories to support OSS developers: A recommender systems approach

To facilitate the development activities, software developers frequently look up external sources for related information. Consulting data available at open source software (OSS) repositories can be considered as their daily routine. Nonetheless, the heterogeneity of resources and their corresponding dependencies are the main obstacles to the effective mining and exploitation of the data. Given the context, the manual search for every single resource to find the most suitable ones is a daunting and inefficient task. Thus, equipping developers with techniques and tools to accelerate the search process as well as to improve the search results will help them enhance the work efficiency. Within the scope of the EU funded CROSSMINER project, advanced techniques and tools are being conceived for providing open software developers with innovative features aiming at obtaining improvements in terms of development effort, cost savings, developer productivity, etc. To this end, cutting-edge technologies are applied, such as information retrieval and recommender systems to solve the problem of mining the rich metadata available at OSS repositories to support software developers. In this paper, we present the main research problems as well the proposed approach together with some preliminary results.