Beyond Replication: An example of the potential benefits of replicability in the Mining of Software Repositories Community

While in theory the mining software repositories is an area where replication is easier to perform than for other empirical software engineering fields, a review of papers presented at the Mining Software Repositories Workshop/Working Conference shows that the research studies presented do not satisfy the requirements for easy replication. In this paper, we present some possibilities that replicability may provide to this community that go beyond the verification of results presented in the original study.