The energy consumption of machine learning applications and their impact on the environment has recently gained attention as a research area, focusing on the model creation and training/inference phases. The data-oriented stages of the machine learning pipeline, which involve pre-processing, cleaning, and exploratory analysis, are critical components. However, energy consumption during these stages has received limited attention. Dataframe processing libraries play a significant role in these stages, and optimizing their energy consumption is important for reducing environmental impact and operational costs. Therefore, as a first step towards studying their energy efficiency, we investigate and compare the energy consumption of three popular dataframe processing libraries, namely Pandas, Vaex, and Dask. We perform experiments across 21 dataframe processing operations within four categories, utilizing three distinct datasets. Our results indicate that no single library is the most energy-efficient for all tasks, and the choice of a library can have a significant impact on energy consumption based on the types and frequencies of operations performed. The findings of this study suggest the potential for optimization of the energy consumption of data-oriented stages in the machine learning pipeline and warrant further research in this area.

Software documentation is one of the critical aspects of a software project, that could support multiple tasks throughout the software development life-cycle. There is extensive research on understanding issues and challenges with existing documentation, which is typically available as readme files. In projects that support collaborative development, such as those on GitHub, other software artifacts such as commits, pull requests and issues, apart from the conventional readme files, wikis and source code comments, also contain useful information, that supports in understanding, using, extending and maintaining the project. However, we are not aware of any dataset that explicitly focuses on documentation-related information in multiple software artifacts such as readme files, commits and pull requests across a repository. To address this concern and to facilitate further research in software documentation, we present DocMine, as a dataset of documentation-related information, extracted from around 1.35M software artifacts in 950 GitHub repositories, spanning across four different programming languages. The dataset along with its documentation is made available in CSV and .sql formats at - https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5195084.

Game engines, are frameworks that provide a platform for developers to build games with an interface tailored to handle the complexity of game development. Though there is extensive empirical research on software frameworks, there is a need for empirical studies on game engines, as they differ from traditional software frameworks. Thus, to aid research and development in the area of game engines, we present GE526, a curated dataset of 526 game engine repositories mined from GitHub, which can help researchers to analyze game engines in terms of the release cycles, code quality, API usability and so on. To the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of any curated dataset that caters to game engines in the literature. The dataset contains metadata of all the mined repositories, including 582,079 commits, 20,138 pull requests, 30,287 issues reports and 2,111 releases. The dataset along with its documentation is made available at - https://bit.ly/3pyexnc.

In the recent years, there has been a surge in the adoption of agile development model and continuous integration (CI) in software development. Recent trends have reduced average release cycle lengths to as low as 1-2 weeks, leading to an extensive number of studies in release engineering. Open-source development (OSD) has also witnessed a rapid increase in release rates, however, no large dataset of open-source projects exists which features high release rates. In this paper, we introduce the RapidRelease dataset, a data showcase of high release frequency open-source projects. The dataset hosts 994 projects from Github, with over 2 million issue reports. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first dataset that can facilitate researchers to empirically study release engineering and agile software development in open-source projects with rapid releases.