The MSR Cookbook: Mining a decade of research

The Mining Software Repositories (MSR) research community has grown significantly since the first MSR workshop was held in 2004. As the community continues to broaden its scope and deepens its expertise, it is worthwhile to reflect on the best practices that our community has developed over the past decade of research. We identify these best practices by surveying past MSR conferences and workshops. To that end, we review all 117 full papers published in the MSR proceedings between 2004 and 2012. We extract 268 comments from these papers, and categorize them using a grounded theory methodology. From this evaluation, four high-level themes were identified: data acquisition and preparation, synthesis, analysis, and sharing/replication. Within each theme we identify several common recommendations, and also examine how these recommendations have evolved over the past decade. In an effort to make this survey a living artifact, we also provide a public forum that contains the extracted recommendations in the hopes that the MSR community can engage in a continuing discussion on our evolving best practices.