How to Share Experiments

OURMINE is an environment for developing and sharing data mining experiments. Adding new tools to OURMINE, in a variety of languages, is a rapid and simple process. This makes it a useful research tool. OURMINE also has pedagogical advantages. Complicated graphical interfaces have been eschewed for simple commandline prompts. This simplifies the learning curve for data mining novices. The simplicity also encourages large scale modification and experimentation with the code. More importantly, OURMINE is a useful communication tool. For example, in this paper, we show the OURMINE code required to reproduce a recent experiment checking how defect predictors learned from one site apply to another. This is an important result for the PROMISE community since it shows that our shared repository is not just a useful academic resource. Rather, it is a valuable resource industry: companies that lack the local data required to build those predictors can use PROMISE data to build defect predictors. As this example shows, OURMINE offers a succinct notation for describing experiments. We therefore propose OURMINE as a candidate technology for the creation of libraries of reusable software engineering experiments.