Ahmed E. Hassan
Queen's University, Canada

Program Co-chairs

Michele Lanza
University of Lugano, Switzerland
Michael W. Godfrey
University of Waterloo, Canada

Challenge Chair

Tsuneo Ajisaka
(Wakayama U., Japan)
Giuliano Antoniol
(École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada)
Abraham Bernstein
(U. of Zurich, Switzerland)
Prem Devanbu
(U. of California, USA)
Stephan Diehl
(U. of Trier, Germany)
Massimiliano di Penta
(U. of Sannio, Italy)
Harald Gall
(U. of Zurich, Switzerland)
Daniel German
(U. of Victoria, Canada)
Tudor Girba
(U. of Bern, Switzerland)
Yann-Gael Gueheneuc
(U. de Montreal, Canada)
Ric Holt
(U. Waterloo, Canada)
Katsuro Inoue
(Osaka U., Japan)
Jonathan Maletic
(Kent State U., USA)
Andrian Marcus
(Wayne State U., USA)
Radu Marinescu
(TU Timisoara, Romania)
Audris Mockus
(Avaya Labs, USA)
Leon Moonen
(Delft U. of Tech., Netherlands)
David Notkin
(U. of Washington, USA)
Masao Ohira
(NAIST, Japan)
Alex Orso
(Georgia Tech, USA)
Dewayne Perry
(U. of Texas, USA)
Martin Pinzger
(U. of Zurich, Switzerland)
Gregorio Robles
(U. of Rey Juan Carlos, Spain)
Jelber Sayyad Shirabad
(Ottawa U., Canada)
Alexandru Telea
(Eindhoven TU, The Netherlands)
Annie Ying
(IBM Research, USA)
Jim Whitehead
(U. of California, USA)
Andreas Zeller
(Saarland U., Germany)
Thomas Zimmermann
(U. of Calgary, Canada)

Local Arrangement Chair

Thomas Zimmermann
University of Calgary, Canada

Web Chair

Marco D'Ambros
University of Lugano, Switzerland

Location

Co-located with ICSE 2008,
Leipzig, Germany

Steering Committee

Ahmed E. Hassan
Queen's University, Canada
Audris Mockus
Avaya, USA
Ric Holt
University of Waterloo, Canada
Katsuro Inoue
Osaka University, Japan
Stephan Diehl
University Trier
Harald Gall
University of Zurich

Prof. Carlo Ghezzi (Politecnico di Milano) will give the keynote titled: "Dynamically Evolving Software: Some Radical Changes of Perspective", with the following abstract:
Software architectures are increasingly distributed, decentralized, and dynamically evolvable. They are often made out of parts that are built, maintained, and run by independent organizations. This implies both change of perspective in our traditional approaches and new challenges for research. I will elaborate on two. First, we traditionally view verification as an off-line activity performed at development time. Increasingly, it must become perpetual, and extend to run time. Second, we often assume that (source) code is available for analysis. In service-based architectures this is not true. In particular, the need arises for extracting or refining specifications from run-time observations of service behaviors.

Prof. Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich) will give the invited tutorial titled: "How to Learn Enough Data Mining to be Dangerous in 60 Minutes", with the following abstract:
The field of data mining provides some methods highly relevant to researchers when mining software repositories. Whether one predicts bug locations, discovers hidden architectural structures and software patterns, or identifies experts of modules, data mining algorithms are usually the working horses for these studies. The goal of this tutorial is to convey some of the most relevant theoretical foundations and practical issues when using data mining algorithms. The tutorial will first discuss the usual data mining tasks (prediction, filtering, smoothing, and elucidation of the most likely explanation or structure). Then, it will introduce a general framework for data mining paving the way to explain the functionality of some of the most used data mining algorithms. The tutorial will close with an overview over the typical evaluation methods for induced results and a number of pointers for further study. Where possible, it will use examples from software engineering.

Overview

Topics

• Approaches, applications, and tools for software repository mining
• Quality aspects and guidelines to ensure quality results in mining
• Meta-models, exchange formats, and infrastructure tools to facilitate the sharing of extracted data and to encourage reuse and repeatability
• Models for social and development processes that occur in large software projects
• Search techniques to assist developers in finding suitable components for reuse
• Techniques to model reliability and defect occurrences
• Analysis of change patterns to assist in future development
• Case studies on extracting data from repositories of large long lived projects
• Visualization techniques and models of mined data
• Methods of integrating mined data from various historical sources

MSR Challenge

1. Open. Discover interesting facts about the history of Eclipse. Results should be reported as 4-page submissions, to be included in the proceedings as challenge papers.
2. Prediction. We will provide the number of bugs that occurred in selected Eclipse packages between 2003 and 2006. We challenge you to predict the number of bugs that will occur in those packages from Feb 10 2008 - May 10 2008. You can provide 1-page long descriptions of the rationale behind your prediction. Wild guesses are also welcome and will put the "real" miners under pressure.