- the idea of unified repository is very nice for research. It is important if we want to be able to share results, and reproduce experiments.
Could it have some interest for industry projects? For example, it could be usefull as a comparison base for a company to understand how good or bad its own software is compared to some other (presumably open source) projects ...
Our idea is to build an open repository containing a collection of models from a large group of projects (qualitas corpus), where each of these models can be annotated and expanded with analysis results. Analysis results could be anything (i.e. all classes of a certain project can be annotated with a certain metric; two classes can be related by a duplication relationship; etc.. ). The resulting "expanded models" can be queried or downloaded (useful if you want to compare the data against results of an industrial project analysis). MSE files are used as a way to import a simple version (no contributed analysis results annotations) of the project model into moose and enable new analyses.
Yes. You can have reduced models either by:
- (1) exporting a reduced (MSE) version from VerveineJ (I guess this is implemented);
- (2) or, importing your full model in Moose and then exporting the entities you want (this is also implemented, not sure if this integrated);
Distributing reduced MSE models of a project does not make much sense to me. You have to take in consideration multiple analysis requirements and build a reduced model for each of them. Would it be possible (and would it make sense) to create a web service which interprets moose queries, runs them on the specified target image and returns a serialized representation of the returned objects ?
- keeping source code (and much more) is important because you never know what people would like to do in the future.
It happened to a team in Brazil recently, they correlated some metrics to bugs. So they needed on top of the MSEs: access to a bug-tracking system to identify bug-identifiers; access to SVN commit comments to identify bug-fixing commits; access to the code to know what methods/classes were changed to correct the bug. Anyway, people want to see source code. If something looks strange in a visualization, you want to go back to the code to understand what's happening.
Since qualitascorpus.com already provides and maintains a good collection of java projects, we thought about reusing that valuable source of information and building the MSE repository as a complement to Qualitas Corpus. This means that MSE files would be generated and hosted by us and source code can be downloaded from qualitascorpus.com.
Andrea