Answer Commonly Asked Project Questions

When mining software archives, we want to learn from the past to shape the future. But what does the research so far tell us about the future of the field itself? For this special issue, we invited and collected statements from nine research leaders in the field. These statements show opportunities for data collection and exploitation (Michael Godfrey, Ahmad Hassan, and James Herbsleb), enhancing programmer productivity (Gail Murphy and Martin Robillard), examining the role of social networking (Prem Devanbu), leveraging data for industry (Audris Mockus), and answering open research questions (Dewayne Perry). David Notkin, though, warns against too much enthusiasm: “Let us not mine for fool’s gold.” Enjoy! —Nachiappan Nagappan, Andreas Zeller, and Thomas Zimmermann, Guest Editors