No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking

Authors: Olga Baysal Reid Holmes Michael W. Godfrey

Venue: FSE   22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 666–677, 2014

Year: 2014

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.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{olgabaysal2014nilbrioiit,
    author = "Olga Baysal and Reid Holmes and Michael W. Godfrey",
    title = "No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking",
    year = "2014",
    pages = "666–677",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering
        "
}

Plain Text:

Olga Baysal, Reid Holmes, and Michael W. Godfrey, "No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking," 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 666–677