With the advent of open-source, the Internet, and the consequent widespread
adoption of distributed development tools, such as software configuration
management and issue tracking systems, a vast amount of valuable information
concerning software development and evolution has become available. Mining
Software Repositories (MSR)-a very active and interest-growing research
field-deals with retrieving and analyzing this data. Empirical analyses of
software repositories allow researchers to validate assumptions previously
based only on intuitions, as well as finding novel theories. In turn, these
theories about the software development phenomenon have been translated into
concrete approaches and tools that support software developers and managers in
their daily tasks. In this tutorial, we provide an overview of the state of the
art of MSR. In particular, we describe what software repositories are, what in
turn Mining Software Repositories is, what techniques are available to
researchers and practitioners, and finally, what the limitations of MSR are
nowadays, and how to fix them.