A prolog-based framework for search, integration and empirical analysis on software evolution data

Software projects use different repositories for storing project and evolution information such as source code, bugs and patches. An integrated system that combines these multiple repositories and can answer a broad range of queries regarding the project's evolution history would be beneficial to both software developers and researchers. For example, the list of source code changes or the list of developers associated with a bug fix are frequent queries for both developers and researchers. Integrating and gathering this information is a tedious, cumbersome, error-prone process when done manually, especially for large projects. Previous approaches to this problem use frameworks that limit the user to a set of pre-defined query templates, or use query languages with limited power. In this paper, we argue the need for a framework built with recursively enumerable languages, that can answer temporal queries, and supports negation and recursion. As a first step toward such a framework, we present a Prolog-based system that we built, along with an evaluation of real-world integrated data from the Firefox project. Our system allows for elegant and concise, yet powerful queries, and can be used by developers and researchers for frequent development and empirical analysis tasks.