RepMine: A System for Transferrable Analyses of Collaboration Activities in Software Engineering

Vast amounts of knowledge exist about collaboration activities in software engineering and their effects on development projects. Much of this knowledge is captured in research papers, and a subset of it is implemented in collaboration support and analysis tools. The main challenge for the development of these tools is thereby to simultaneously keep up with latest research and changing collaboration infrastructures. If tools are not compatible with recent collaboration tools, or provide outdated analyses, software engineering teams will stop using them. The RepMine system, which we present in this paper, provides a means to store analyses of collaboration activities using a graph-based query abstraction and transfer them to other representations of collaboration data through a semi-automatic ontology matching approach. This decoupling of analyses from data collection reduces the efforts for supporting emerging or changing infrastructures. As the system implements a catalogue for collaboration activity analyses, it can also be readily kept up-to-date with latest research.