QORAL: An External Domain-Specific Language for Mining Software Repositories

The mining software repositories (MSR) field integrates and analyzes data stored in repositories such as source control and bug repositories to provide support to practitioners. In order to provide useful information to practitioners, MSR researchers need to perform tasks iteratively, these tasks include extracting data from repositories, transforming them into specific data formats, and loading them into the statistical analysis tool. These tasks require a significant amount of man hours to implement and execute according to the requirements of the researchers. This paper proposes an external domain-specific language (DSL) called QORAL to facilitate the performance of multiple iterations and environment development. The results from a questionnaire used to evaluate QORAL indicate that it is easy to understand and modify source code.