ICSE

Welcome to MSR 2011, the Eighth International Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, held May 21-22 in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii, and co-located with the 2011 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2011).

This is the fourth year that MSR has been a Working Conference, building on the strong foundation of four years as a successful ICSE workshop. We are happy to report that the community of MSR researchers continues to grow, while at the same time the research being performed is maturing. This year saw a further increase in the total number of submissions: 61 full paper submissions (10 pages) and 17 short paper submissions (4 pages) for a total of 78. This total is 11 more than the 67 total submissions in 2010. Full paper submissions increased by 10 (61 vs. 51) while short paper submissions increased by 1 (17 vs. 16).

Of the 61 full paper submissions, 20 were ultimately accepted, for a full paper accept rate of 33%. For short papers, of the 17 submissions 6 were accepted, for a short paper accept rate of 35%. Following last year's conference, MSR 2011 accepted or rejected papers at their submitted length, and did not permit downgrading of a paper from full paper to short paper. All accepted papers will be presented at the conference. Each paper received three reviews by members of the program committee. After we received all reviews, an online discussion process allowed variance among reviews to be understood, and in many cases, consensus to emerge. The program committee chairs then personally read all of the reviews and commentary prior to making final decisions.

In the content of the papers, this year sees a continuation of previous topics, as well as the emergence of some new ones. Following MSR 2010, in MSR 2011, full papers receive a full 15 minutes for presentation within a block of papers within a session. In keeping with MSR's roots as a working conference, full paper sessions have 30 minutes for discussion of papers. For short papers, each paper has 7 minutes in a presentation session.

The conference has two keynote presentations this year. Professor E. James Whitehead, at UC Santa Cruz in the USA, will present a talk entitled, Fantasy, Farms, and Freemium: What Game Data Mining Teaches Us About Retention, Conversion, and Virality; this talk will focus on computer games and opportunities for mining. Professor Yuanyuan Zhou, at UC San Diego in the USA, will present a talk entitled, Connecting Technology with Real?world Problems -- From Copy-paste Detection to Detecting Known Bugs; this talk will focus on her tech?transfer experiences from copy-paste detection to checking for known bugs.

We are pleased to continue the tradition of the MSR challenge track, where researchers from across the community apply their mining techniques to a common problem. This year the main theme of the challenge is on comparison of projects. We selected four open source projects, and invited submissions to compare them and uncover interesting similarities and differences. The projects are Eclipse and Netbeans, two popular IDEs written in Java (Group 1) and Firefox and Chrome, two web browsers written in C/C++ (Group 2). Submissions were invited to analyze more than one project, ideally in the same group, or analyze a single project (4 page sub mission). The conference received 6 challenge track submissions, of which 5 were accepted and will be presented at the conference.

We are also delighted to announce that a selection of the best papers from this year's conference will be invited to submit an extended version for consideration in a special issue of the Springer journal Empirical Software Engineering. The invitees will be announced during the opening session of MSR 2011.