Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use (original) (raw)

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 ...

Improving developer activity metrics with issue tracking annotations

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering, 2010

Understanding and measuring how groups of developers collaborate on software projects can provide valuable insight into software quality and the software development process. Current practices of measuring developer collaboration (e.g. with social network analysis) usually employ metrics based on version control change log data to determine who is working on which part of the system. Version control change logs, however, do not tell the whole story. Information about the collaborative problemsolving process is also documented in the issue tracking systems that record solutions to failures, feature requests, or other development tasks. To enrich the data gained from version control change logs, we propose two annotations to be used in issue tracking systems: solution originator and solution approver. We examined the online discussions of 602 issues from the OpenMRS healthcare web application, annotating which developers were the originators of the solution to the issue, or were the approvers of the solution. We used these annotations to augment the version control change logs and found 47 more contributors to the OpenMRS project than the original 40 found in the version control change logs. Applying social network analysis to the data, we found that central developers in a developer network have a high likelihood of being approvers. These results indicate that using our two issue tracking annotations identify project collaborators that version control change logs miss. However, in the absence of our annotations, developer network centrality can be used as an estimate of the project's solution approvers. This improvement in developer activity metrics provides a valuable connection between what we can measure in the project development artifacts and the team's problem-solving process.

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.

Web-based issue tracking for large software projects

IEEE Internet Computing, 1998

Many problems are found and fixed during the development of a software system. The Project Issue Tracking System toolkit, a Web-based issuemanagement tool, can be used to organize issue reports during development and to communicate with different project teams around the world.

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.

MAITH: a meta-software agent for issue tracking help

Issue tracking is an essential part of regulated software development where it is typically supported by software systems which are complex and not easily customizable. We propose a meta-software agent that senses what windows and widgets are in focus by the user and leverages this awareness to provide support. The user is given ways of making and recalling annotations appropriate for the context. By observing users in action the agent creates models which can then be used to predict and suggest next steps. This paper describes an early prototype of this approach built as a proof of concept. Preliminary results and directions for future work are outlined.

Situational Awareness: Personalizing Issue Tracking Systems

Abstract—Issue tracking systems play a central role in ongoing software development; they are used by developers to support collaborative bug fixing and the implementation of new features, but they are also used by other stakeholders including managers, QA, and end-users for tasks such as project management, communication and discussion, code reviews, and history tracking.

Embrace Your Issues: Compassing the Software Engineering Landscape using Bug Reports

Proc. of the 29th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (Doctoral Symposium), 2014

Software developers in large projects work in complex information landscapes, and staying on top of all relevant software artifacts is challenging. As software systems often evolve for years, a high number of issue reports is typically managed during the lifetime of a system. Efficient management of incoming issue requires successful navigation of the information landscape. In our work, we address two important work tasks involved in issue management: Issue Assignment (IA) and Change Impact Analysis (CIA). IA is the early task of allocating an issue report to a development team. CIA deals with identifying how source code changes affect the software system, a fundamental activity in safetycritical development. Our solution approach is to support navigation, both among development teams and software artifacts, based on information available in historical issue reports. We present how we apply techniques from machine learning and information retrieval to develop recommendation systems. Finally, we report intermediate results from two controlled experiments and an industrial case study.

Automation for regulated issue tracking activities

We describe the application of automated support for issue tracking and related software engineering activities of development teams at the world's largest medical device manufacturer. We present some challenges and classes of defects found in product software, related artifacts, and the issues which track them. We describe enhanced means for defect detection, data mining and analysis, and other novel support we provide at the time of issue review. Finally, we describe evidence of the positive impact of this support, its adoption, lessons learned and potential next steps.