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No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking

Authors:

Michael W. GodfreyAuthors Info & Claims

FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 666 - 677

https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635887

Published: 11 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Modern software development tools such as issue trackers are often complex and multi-purpose tools that provide access to an immense amount of raw information. Unfortunately, developers sometimes feel frustrated when they cannot easily obtain the particular information they need for a given task; furthermore, the constant influx of new data — the vast majority of which is irrelevant to their task at hand — may result in issues being "dropped on the floor". In this paper, we present a developer-centric approach to issue tracking that aims to reduce information overload and improve developers' situational awareness. Our approach is motivated by a grounded theory study of developer comments, which suggests that customized views of a project's repositories that are tailored to developer-specific tasks can help developers better track their progress and understand the surrounding technical context. From the qualitative study, we uncovered a model of the kinds of information elements that are essential for developers in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we built a tool organized around customized issue-tracking dashboards. Further quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrated that this dashboard-like approach to issue tracking can reduce the volume of irrelevant emails by over 99% and also improve support for specific issue-tracking tasks.

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Cited By

Sanei ACheng J(2024)Characterizing Usability Issue Discussions in Open Source Software ProjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373078:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637307
Bai SLiu HDai ELiu L(2024)Improving Issue-PR Link Prediction via Knowledge-Aware Heterogeneous Graph LearningIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.340844850:7(1901-1920)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3408448
Wadhams ZReinhold AIzurieta C(2024)Automating Static Code Analysis Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering - Companion (SANER-C)10.1109/SANER-C62648.2024.00021(119-125)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER-C62648.2024.00021
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Index Terms

No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
        Software maintenance
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management

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cover image ACM Conferences

FSE 2014: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2014

856 pages

ISBN:9781450330565

DOI:10.1145/2635868

General Chair:
Shing-Chi Cheung
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, China
,
Program Chairs:
Alessandro Orso
Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
,
Margaret-Anne Storey
University of Victoria, Canada

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 11 November 2014

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SIGSOFT/FSE'14: 22nd ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 16 - 21, 2014

Hong Kong, China

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Sanei ACheng J(2024)Characterizing Usability Issue Discussions in Open Source Software ProjectsProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36373078:CSCW1(1-26)Online publication date: 26-Apr-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637307
Bai SLiu HDai ELiu L(2024)Improving Issue-PR Link Prediction via Knowledge-Aware Heterogeneous Graph LearningIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2024.340844850:7(1901-1920)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TSE.2024.3408448
Wadhams ZReinhold AIzurieta C(2024)Automating Static Code Analysis Through CI/CD Pipeline Integration2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering - Companion (SANER-C)10.1109/SANER-C62648.2024.00021(119-125)Online publication date: 12-Mar-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER-C62648.2024.00021
Caddy JTreude CWagner MBarr E(2024)The role of surprisal in issue trackersEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10587-w30:1Online publication date: 23-Nov-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10587-w
Li ZYu YWang TLei YWang YWang H(2023) To Follow or Not to Follow: Understanding Issue/Pull-Request Templates on GitHub IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.322405349:4(2530-2544)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3224053
Raatikainen MMotger QLüders CFranch XMyllyaho LKettunen EMarco JTiihonen JHalonen MMännistö T(2023)Improved Management of Issue Dependencies in Issue Trackers of Large Collaborative ProjectsIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2022.321216649:4(2128-2148)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2022.3212166
Wang WArya DNovielli NCheng JGuo JBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)ArguLens: Anatomy of Community Opinions On Usability Issues Using Argumentation ModelsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376218(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
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Marques ABradley NMurphy G(2020)Characterizing Task-Relevant Information in Natural Language Software Artifacts2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME)10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00052(476-487)Online publication date: Sep-2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSME46990.2020.00052
Mahdi MAhmad AIsmail RNatiq HMohammed M(2020)Solution for Information Overload Using Faceted Search–A ReviewIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2020.30055368(119554-119585)Online publication date: 2020
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3005536
Le XBao LLo DXia XLi SPasareanu CAtlee JBultan TWhittle J(2019)On reliability of patch correctness assessmentProceedings of the 41st International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE.2019.00064(524-535)Online publication date: 25-May-2019
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