DepMiner: A Pipelineable Tool for Mining of Intra-Project Dependencies
This addresses a gap for software engineering researchers needing dependency data, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IDE capabilities.
The authors tackled the lack of tools for extracting intra-project dependencies in a format suitable for research by introducing DepMiner, an open-source, language-agnostic tool based on IDE static analysis that enables large-scale pipeline integration.
Dependency analysis is recognized as an important field of software engineering due to a variety of reasons. There exists a large pool of tools providing assistance to software developers and architects. Analysis of inter- and intra-project dependencies can help provide various insights about the entire development process. There is, however, currently a lack of tools that would support researchers by extracting intra-project dependencies data in a format most suited for further analysis. In this paper we introduce DepMiner - an open source, language-agnostic tool for mining detailed dependencies data from source code, based on extensive static analysis capabilities of an industry standard IDE. DepMiner can be easily integrated into arbitrary mining pipelines to conduct large-scale source code processing jobs involving intra-project dependencies. It is easily extensible to support other languages of source code, different granularities of analysis, and other use-specific needs.