Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams (original) (raw)
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Communication, collaboration, and bugs: The social nature of issue tracking in software engineering
2010
ABSTRACT Issue tracking systems help organizations manage issue reporting, assignment, tracking, resolution, and archiving. Traditionally, it is the Software Engineering community that researches issue tracking systems, where software defects are reported and tracked as 'bug reports' within an archival database. Yet issue tracking is fundamentally a social process and, as such, it is important to understand the design and use of issue tracking systems from that perspective.
Understanding the Use of a Bug Tracking System in a Global Software Development Setup
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction on - OzCHI '15, 2015
Bug fixing is a highly cooperative work activity where developers, testers, product managers and other stakeholders collaborate using a bug tracking system. In the context of Global Software Development (GSD), where software development is distributed across different geographical locations, we focus on understanding the role of bug trackers in supporting software bug fixing activities. We carried out a small-scale ethnographic fieldwork in a software product team distributed between Finland and India at a multinational engineering company. Using semi-structured interviews and in-situ observations of 16 bug cases, we show that the bug tracker 1) supported information needs of different stake holder, 2) established common-ground, and 3) reinforced issues related to ownership, performance and power. Consequently, we provide implications for design around these findings.
Got Issues? Who Cares About It? An Investigation of Issue Trackers of 10 5 Projects
Feedback from software users constitutes a vital part in the evolution of software projects. By filing issue reports, users help identify and fix bugs, document software code, and enhance the software via feature requests. Many studies have explored issue reports, proposed approaches to enable the submission of higher-quality reports, and presented techniques to sort, categorize and leverage issues for software engineering needs. Who, however, cares about filing issues? What kind of issues are reported in issue trackers? What kind of correlation exist between issue reporting and the success of software projects? In this study, we address the need for answering such questions by performing an empirical study on a hundred thousands of open source projects. We investigate and answer various research questions on the popularity and impact of issue trackers.
Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use
Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies
An Issue Tracking System (ITS) allows a developer to keep track of, prioritize, and assign multitudes of bugs, feature requests, and other development tasks such as testing. Despite ITSs play a significant role in day-today developers' activities, no previous study investigated what developers want and use in an ITS. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a feature matrix that maps six of the most used ITS to features, and second, we measure the developers' level of use and perceived importance of each feature. This knowledge has multiple benefits such as supporting the decision of the ITS to use and revealing promising areas of research and development. Specifically, quality improvement effort should target improving functionality in use, and development effort should target supporting functionalities needed. In this paper, we define and extract ten core ITS features and asked more than a hundred developers to rate their importance and use. Our results show that Advanced Search and Flexible Notifications are the most important features. Moreover, results show that no feature has been used by more than 90% of the respondents. Another interesting finding is that 27% of respondents rate Workflow Automation as a useful or required feature, despite having never used it themselves; this suggests the need to better training, exposure or of availability of ITS features. In conclusion, our results pave the way to significant research and development effort on ITS.
Improved dependency management for issue trackers in large collaborative projects
ArXiv, 2021
Issue trackers, such as Jira, have become the prevalent collaborative tools in software engineering for managing issues, such as requirements, development tasks, and software bugs. However, issue trackers inherently focus on the life-cycle of single issues although issues have and express dependencies on other issues that constitute an issue dependency network in a large complex collaborative projects. The objective of this study is to develop supportive solutions for the improved management of dependent issues in an issue tracker. This study follows Design Science methodology, consisting of elicitation of drawbacks, and construction and evaluation of a solution and system. The study was carried out in the context of The Qt Company’s Jira, which exemplifies an actively used, almost two decade old issue tracker with over 100,000 issues. The drawbacks capture how users operate with issue trackers to handle issue information in large, collaborative and long-lived projects. The basis of...
Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2018
Fixing software bug is part of the daily work routine in software engineering which requires collaboration and thus has been explored as a core CSCW domain, since the early inception of the research field. In this paper, we explore the use of chat technology in software engineering by analyzing the coordination between client and vendor in a large government software project in Brazil (Gov-IT). We collected our empirical material through face-to-face and online interviews, site and chat forums observations. Looking closely at the bug fixing activities within Gov-IT, we find that the client and the vendor use chat technology to coordinate their cooperative work by enabling the participants to monitor the availability of developers and the urgency of detecting bugs synchronously. This way, the chat technology made it possible for the client to report bugs and developers to resolve bugs in a timely manner. Moreover, the chat technology enabled the participants to request and share artefacts synchronously, making it possible to analyze and understand the contextual nature surrounding bugs faster than using the bug tracking system. Finally, the chat technology enabled participants in enacting commitment and interdependence across vendor and client, creating cooperative situations of mutual dependence. Our results suggest that we, as CSCW designers, must rethink the design of bug tracking systems and find new ways to re-configure systems, so they support the coordinative practices involved in detecting, analyzing, and resolving critical and severe software bugs synchronously.
Improved Management of Issue Dependencies in Issue Trackers of Large Collaborative Projects
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Issue trackers, such as Jira, have become the prevalent collaborative tools in software engineering for managing issues, such as requirements, development tasks, and software bugs. However, issue trackers inherently focus on the lifecycle of single issues, although issues have and express dependencies on other issues that constitute issue dependency networks in large complex collaborative projects. The objective of this study is to develop supportive solutions for the improved management of dependent issues in an issue tracker. This study follows the Design Science methodology, consisting of eliciting drawbacks and constructing and evaluating a solution and system. The study was carried out in the context of The Qt Company's Jira, which exemplifies an actively used, almost two-decade-old issue tracker with over 100,000 issues. The drawbacks capture how users operate with issue trackers to handle issue information in large, collaborative, and long-lived projects. The basis of the solution is to keep issues and dependencies as separate objects and automatically construct an issue graph. Dependency detections complement the issue graph by proposing missing dependencies, while consistency checks and diagnoses identify conflicting issue priorities and release assignments. Jira's plugin and service-based system architecture realize the functional and quality concerns of the system implementation. We show how to adopt the intelligent supporting techniques of an issue tracker in a complex use context and a large data-set. The solution considers an integrated and holistic system view, practical applicability and utility, and the practical characteristics of issue data, such as inherent incompleteness.
Software problem management as information management in a F/OSS development community
2005
Abstract–Bug reports created by a large, successful open source software development community show that software problem management (SWPM) is first of all information management and secondarily a problem solving activity. Solving software problems occurs only after a bug report, a first-class information object, has been created and “triaged” by community members. One predominant structural feature of defect tracking repositories is the evolving" bug report network"(BRN).
Bug Tracking, Help Desk Ticketing, issue raising, search facility, help information, issue resolution. Issues related to software projects can be raised, tracked and resolved by Employees of different departments. Resolved issues can be allowed to access from Knowledge Base as Knowledge elements. The different groups and representatives can interact each other through emails. The issue tracking system does all the jobs that are done in conventional system but ,here , everything is done in more formal and efficient manner. All the users of organization can interact with each other through the Issue Tracking System. This system acts as an interface between the employees thereby enabling them to forward their issues to the centralized Issue tracking system. Hence, making the work easy for both the issue raiser and the resolved. It totally avoids the involvement of middlemen in getting resolution for a particular issue.The Issue Tracking system is an intranet application, which provides information about issues in software projects, in detail. This product develops a system that can be used by all the departments of a software organization. In the conventional method, all the issues are dealt manually .The progress of the issues are also checked in person, which is a tedious task. Here, in Issue Tracking, it fulfills different requirements of administrator and employees of a software development organization efficiently. The specific purpose of the system is to gather and resolve issues that arise in different projects handled by the organization
On the Use of Issue Tracking Annotations for Improving Developer Activity Metrics
Advances in Software Engineering, 2011
Understanding and measuring how teams of developers collaborate on software projects can provide valuable insight into the software development process. Currently, researchers and practitioners measure developer collaboration with social networks constructed from version control logs. Version control change logs, however, do not tell the whole story. The collaborative problem-solving process is also documented in the issue tracking systems that record solutions to failures, feature requests, or other development tasks. We propose two ...