Boa Views: Enabling Modularization and Sharing of Boa Queries

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) field is well established, and recently has seen a focus on moving analysis techniques to a larger scale analyzing thousands of projects. Several tools exist to support these efforts, such as the Boa language and infrastructure. While Boa has seen extensive use by over one thousand users, in its current form it is not always possible to perform the entire analysis task within the infrastructure, often requiring some post-processing in another language. To address this problem, we use the notion of views from the relational database field and designed a language extension and runtime infrastructure in Boa that we call materialized views. Materialized views provide output reuse to Boa users, so that the results of prior Boa queries can be reused by users. This allows for computing results not previously possible within Boa and provides more sharing and reuse of MSR queries. To evaluate views, we performed two partial reproductions of prior MSR studies utilizing Boa’s dataset and infrastructure with Boa and compare our results to the prior studies. This shows the usability of the new infrastructure, allowing analyses in Boa that were not previously possible as well as providing a previously hand created gold dataset for identifier splitting as a reusable view for other MSR researchers. We also verified the caching behavior using the queries from one of the case studies. The results show that caching works as expected and can drastically improve the runtime performance.