Visual querying and analysis of large software repositories

We present a software framework for mining software repositories. Our extensible framework enables the integration of data extraction from repositories with data analysis and interactive visualization. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by presenting several case studies performed on industry-size software repositories. In each study we use the framework to give answers to one or several software engineering questions addressing a specific project. Next, we validate the answers by comparing them with existing project documentation, by interviewing domain experts and by detailed analyses of the source code. The results show that our framework can be used both for supporting case studies on mining software repository techniques and for building end-user tools for software maintenance