A Systematic Mapping Study on Analysis of Code Repositories

Code repositories contain valuable information, which can be extracted, processed and synthesized into valuable information. It enabled developers to improve maintenance, increase code quality and understand software evolution, among other insights. Certain research has been made during the last years in this field. This paper presents a systematic mapping study to find, evaluate and investigate the mechanisms, methods and techniques used for the analysis of information from code repositories that allow the understanding of the evolution of software. Through this mapping study, we have identified the main information used as input for the analysis of code repositories (commit data and source code), as well as the most common methods and techniques of analysis (empirical/experimental and automatic). We believe the conducted research is useful for developers working on software development projects and seeking to improve maintenance and understand the evolution of software through the use and analysis of code repositories.