Domain analysis for mining software repositories: Towards feature-based DSL construction

The mining software repositories (MSR) analyze data stored in software repositories and discover meaningful information to support software development. However, MSR is complex due to conducting large scale data collection with various repositories. To help practitioners perform MSR analysis, one possible way is to apply the approaches of software product line (SPL) to the MSR domain to understand variability and commonality for the domain, and to construct domain specific languages (DSLs) because DSLs have high readability to reduce the complexity of the procedure of MSR. In this paper, we construct a SQL-based DSL to support MSR and provide a systematic approach to conduct Feature-Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) for MSR towards the construction of the DSL. We provide the syntax of the DSL and explain how to locate language elements of the DSL to the four-layer structure used in FODA.