Reverse Engineering Super-Repositories

Reverse engineering and software evolution research has been focused mostly on analyzing single software systems. However, rarely a project exists in isolation; instead, projects exist in parallel within a larger context given by a company, a research group or the open-source community. Technically, such a context manifests itself in the form of super-repositories, containers of several projects developed in parallel. Well-known examples of such super-repositories include SourceForge and CodeHaus. We present an easily accessible platform which supports the analysis of such super-repositories. The platform can be valuable for reverse engineering both the projects and the structure of the organization as reflected in the interactions and collaborations between developers. Throughout the paper we present various types of analysis applied to three open-source and one industrial Smalltalk super- repositories, containing hundreds of projects developed by dozens of people.