Automatic Identification and Extraction of Assumptions on GitHub

Abstract: In software development, due to the lack of knowledge or information, time pressure, complex context, and many other factors, various uncertainties emerge during the development process, leading to assumptions scattered in projects. Being unaware of certain assumptions can result in critical problems (e.g., system vulnerability and failures). The prerequisite of analyzing and understanding assumptions in software development is to identify and extract those assumptions with acceptable effort. In this paper, we proposed a tool (i.e., Assumption Miner) to automatically identify and extract assumptions on GitHub projects. To evaluate the applicability of Assumption Miner, we first presented an example of using the tool to mine assumptions from one large and popular deep learning framework project: the TensorFlow project on GitHub. We then conducted an evaluation of the tool. The results show that Assumption Miner can effectively identify and extract assumptions from the repositories on GitHub.