An architectural blueprint for a pluggable version control system for software (evolution) analysis

Current version control systems are not built to be systematically analyzed. They have greatly evolved since their first appearance, but their focus has always been towards supporting developers in forward engineering activities. Supporting the analysis of the development history has so far been neglected. A plethora of third party applications have been built to fill this gap. To extract the data needed, they use interfaces that were not built for that. Drawing from our experience in mining and analyzing version control repositories, we propose an architectural blueprint for a plug-in based version control system in which analyses can be directly plugged into it in a flexible and lightweight way, to support both developers and analysts. We show the potential of this approach in three usage scenarios and we also give some examples for these analysis plug-ins.