poster

Request for comments: conversation patterns in issue tracking systems of open-source projects

Authors:

Patrick MäderAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1414 - 1417

https://doi.org/10.1145/3341105.3374056

Published: 30 March 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Issue tracking systems play an important role in developing software systems. They provide a central place to store and maintain different development artifacts. Various studies are concerned with the contained bug reports, features, the relations among them and traces to the projects code base. However, an issue tracker can also be used as a communication channel between project contributors by attaching comments to issues. Less is known on how users actually utilize this functionality. In this paper, we study more than 270,000 comments from twelve open-source projects. We analyze to what extend comments are used and then study the structure occurring in threads of comments. Based on the order of comments and participating contributors, we identified three patterns of conversation: monolog, feedback, and collaboration. Our results show that most conversations are collaborations among two or more developers discussing the issue.

References

[1]

Dane Bertram, Amy Voida, Saul Greenberg, and Robert Walker. 2010. Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams. In Proc. of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work.

Digital Library

[2]

Swapna Gottipati, David Lo, and Jing Jiang. 2011. Finding relevant answers in software forums. In 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).

Digital Library

[3]

JIRA 2018. JIRA. https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira.

[4]

JIRA Documentation 2018. Commenting on an Issue. https://bit.ly/2CXZRaQ.

[5]

Eric Knauss, Daniela E. Damian, Germán Poo-Caamaho, and Jane Cleland-Huang. 2012. Detecting and classifying patterns of requirements clarifications. In 2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE).

Digital Library

[6]

Andrew J. Ko and Parmit K. Chilana. 2010. How power users help and hinder open bug reporting. In Proc. of the 28th Int. Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI.

[7]

Andrew J. Ko and Parmit K. Chilana. 2011. Design, discussion, and dissent in open bug reports. In iConference 2011, Inspiration, Integrity, and Intrepidity.

[8]

Thorsten Merten, Matus Falis, Paul Hübner, Thomas Quirchmayr, Simone Bürsner, and Barbara Paech. 2016. Software Feature Request Detection in Issue Tracking Systems. In 24th IEEE Int. Requirements Engineering Conf, RE.

[9]

Alessandro Murgia, Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, and Marco Ortu. 2014. Do developers feel emotions? an exploratory analysis of emotions in software artifacts. In 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR.

Digital Library

[10]

Marco Ortu, Giuseppe Destefanis, Bram Adams, Alessandro Murgia, Michele Marchesi, and Roberto Tonelli. 2015. The JIRA Repository Dataset: Understanding Social Aspects of Software Development. In Proc. of the 11th Int. Conf. on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering, PROMISE.

Digital Library

[11]

D. Poshyvanyk, Y.-G. Gueheneuc, A. Marcus, G. Antoniol, and V. Rajlich. 2007. Feature Location Using Probabilistic Ranking of Methods Based on Execution Scenarios and Information Retrieval. IEEE Trans. Softw. Eng. (2007).

[12]

Roger S Pressman. 2005. Software engineering: a practitioner's approach. Palgrave Macmillan.

Digital Library

[13]

Michael Rath and Patrick Mäder. 2019. Replication Data for: Request for Comments: Conversation Patterns in Issue Tracking Systems of Open-Source Projects. https://bit.ly/38d5AYk.

[14]

Michael Rath, Patrick Rempel, and Patrick Mäder. 2017. The IlmSeven Dataset. In 25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2017.

[15]

Patrick Rempel and Patrick Mäder. 2015. Estimating the Implementation Risk of Requirements in Agile Software Development Projects with Traceability Metrics. In Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality - 21st Int. Working Conference, REFSQ, Samuel A. Fricker and Kurt Schneider (Eds.). Springer.

[16]

Patrick Rempel and Patrick Mäder. 2017. Preventing Defects: The Impact of Requirements Traceability Completeness on Software Quality. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. (2017).

Digital Library

[17]

Peter C. Rigby and Ahmed E. Hassan. 2007. What Can OSS Mailing Lists Tell Us? A Preliminary Psychometric Text Analysis of the Apache Developer Mailing List. In Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, MSR. IEEE Computer Society.

Digital Library

[18]

Emad Shihab, Zhen Ming Jiang, and Ahmed E. Hassan. 2009. Studying the use of developer IRC meetings in open source projects. In 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance ICSM. IEEE Computer Society.

[19]

Ian Skerrett and The Eclipse Foundation. 2011. The Eclipse Community Survey 2011. Technical Report.

[20]

Margaret-Anne D. Storey and Alexey Zagalsky. 2016. Disrupting developer productivity one bot at a time. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, FSE. ACM.

[21]

Shaowei Wang and David Lo. 2014. Version history, similar report, and structure: putting them together for improved bug localization. In 22nd International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC ACM.

Digital Library

[22]

Jian Zhou, Hongyu Zhang, and David Lo. 2012. Where should the bugs be fixed? More accurate information retrieval-based bug localization based on bug reports. In 34th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE.

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
Shafiq SMayr‐Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed A(2024)Balanced knowledge distribution among software development teams—Observations from open‐ and closed‐source software developmentJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.2655Online publication date: 13-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2655
Agrawal VLin YCheng J(2022)Understanding the Characteristics of Visual Contents in Open Source Issue Discussions: A Case Study of Jupyter NotebookThe International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 202210.1145/3530019.3534082(249-254)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1145/3530019.3534082
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Request for comments: conversation patterns in issue tracking systems of open-source projects

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

Comments-oriented blog summarization by sentence extraction
CIKM '07: Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management

Much existing research on blogs focused on posts only, ignoring their comments. Our user study conducted on summarizing blog posts, however, showed that reading comments does change one's understanding about blog posts. In this research, we aim to ...
The politics of comments: predicting political orientation of news stories with commenters' sentiment patterns
CSCW '11: Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work

Political views frequently conflict in the coverage of contentious political issues, potentially causing serious social problems. We present a novel social annotation analysis approach for identification of news articles' political orientation. The ...
Comments-oriented document summarization: understanding documents with readers' feedback
SIGIR '08: Proceedings of the 31st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

Comments left by readers on Web documents contain valuable information that can be utilized in different information retrieval tasks including document search, visualization, and summarization. In this paper, we study the problem of comments-oriented ...

Comments

Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '20: Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 2020

2348 pages

ISBN:9781450368667

DOI:10.1145/3341105

Conference Chairs:
Chih-Cheng Hung
Kennesaw State University
,
Tomas Cerny
Baylor University
,
Program Chairs:
Dongwan Shin
New Mexico Tech
,
Alessio Bechini
University of Pisa, Italy

Copyright © 2020 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 30 March 2020

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Poster

Funding Sources

Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung
Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
DLR grant
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Conference

SAC '20

Sponsor:

SIGAPP

SAC '20: The 35th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 30 - April 3, 2020

Brno, Czech Republic

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

6
Total Citations
View Citations
206
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)12
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 22 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

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
Shafiq SMayr‐Dorn CMashkoor AEgyed A(2024)Balanced knowledge distribution among software development teams—Observations from open‐ and closed‐source software developmentJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.2655Online publication date: 13-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2655
Agrawal VLin YCheng J(2022)Understanding the Characteristics of Visual Contents in Open Source Issue Discussions: A Case Study of Jupyter NotebookThe International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 202210.1145/3530019.3534082(249-254)Online publication date: 13-Jun-2022
https://doi.org/10.1145/3530019.3534082
Moharil AOrlov DJameel STrouwen TCassee NSerebrenik ALo DMcIntosh SNovielli N(2022)Between JIRA and GitHubProceedings of the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories10.1145/3524842.3528528(112-116)Online publication date: 23-May-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3524842.3528528
Sanei ACheng JAdams B(2021)The Impacts of Sentiments and Tones in Community-Generated Issue Discussions2021 IEEE/ACM 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE)10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00009(1-10)Online publication date: May-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE52884.2021.00009
Kim JLee S(2021)An Empirical Study on Using Multi-Labels for Issues in GitHubIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.31160619(134984-134997)Online publication date: 2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3116061

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents