Within software engineering, the mining software repositories[1] (MSR) field [2] analyzes the rich data available in software repositories, such as version control repositories, mailing list archives, bug tracking systems, issue tracking systems, etc.
Herzig and Zeller define ”mining software archives” as a process to ”obtain lots of initial evidence” by extracting data from software repositories.
These couplings between the entities are often not made explicit in the code or other documents.
For instance, Jadeite computes usage statistics and helps newcomers to quickly identify commonly used classes.
[6] The primary mining data comes from version control systems.