Conducting quantitative software engineering studies with Alitheia Core

Quantitative empirical software engineering research benefits mightily from processing large open source software repository data sets. The diversity of repository management tools and the long history of some projects, renders the task of working with those datasets a tedious and error-prone exercise. The Alitheia Core analysis platform preprocesses repository data into an intermediate format that allows researchers to provide custom analysis tools. Alitheia Core automatically distributes the processing load on multiple processors while enabling programmatic access to the raw data, the metadata, and the analysis results. The tool has been successfully applied on hundreds of medium to large-sized open-source projects, enabling large-scale empirical studies.