Releasing a software product often is seen as the end point of the software development process: everything's implemented, time to earn some cash! Of course, quite the opposite is true, since 40 to 80% of software development costs are spent during software maintenance activities after release, i.e., to fix bugs, improve the user experience and add new functionality.
MCIS' mission is to help practitioners maintain their software systems. For example, which files should be tested or fixed first and by who? Which bug to fix first? Did the performance of our system degrade compared to the previous release? How can we improve the energy consumption of our system? Will this change have nasty consequences on other features?
By empirical research on software development process data stored in revision control systems (CVS, Subversion, Git, ...), mailing list archives, bug repositories (Bugzilla, Jira, ...), online documentation and manuals, MCIS tries to address the above questions, and many more! Typically, the outcome of our research are models developed using data mining, statistical analysis and manual analysis.
