Historical Data Repositories in Software Engineering: Status and Possible Improvements

Historical datasets, or Historical Data Repositories (HDR) are important in software engineering, because they support a variety of useful analyses for benchmarking as well as estimation process purposes. Besides private repositories, some public domain data repositories - such as the PROMISE and the ISBSG datasets - have been available for over 15 years. Regardless of their importance, such repositories evolved more in amount of data points, than quality or conformity to commonly agreed practices for data collection and verification. This paper provides some considerations about current issues and possible improvements of (public) HDR's.