Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions

Abstract

Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS) projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Index Terms-collaborative software engineering, issue tracking system, issue discussion analysis

GitHub Discussions: An exploratory study of early adoption

“…From the study of discussions in issue tracking systems, Arya et al reported various discussion categories in issue discussions, such as observed bug behaviour, bug reproduction, solution discussion, etc. (Arya et al 2019). We observed some categories overlap with categories found in GitHub Discussions, such as task progress, future plan, and social conversation.…”

The Impacts of Sentiments and Tones in Community-Generated Issue Discussions

“…Bertram et al [23] investigated the use of ITSs in collocated and closed software development teams and identified the role of the issue discussion threads as conversations that serve as "a focal point for communication and coordination." More recently, Arya et al [2] have identified 16 types of information that are commonly embedded in issue discussion threads. Rath and M ader [24] also identified three patterns of conversation (i.e., monolog, feedback, and collaboration) when stakeholders discuss the various topics in ITSs.…”

“…Modern software engineering tools such as Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enabled the collection and elaboration of these issues on a large scale. Many ITSs (e.g., Jira and GitHub Issues) do not only allow community members to manage bug reports, feature requests, enhancements, questions, and other related topics about the project, but they also provide communication and community building features to facilitate the discussion about these issues [2]. Thus, an effective discussion plays a crucial role in the development of the initial ideas posted in the issues into elaborated and actionable tasks for the development team to address.…”

How Do Open Source Software Contributors Perceive and Address Usability?: Valued Factors, Practices, and Challenges

“…This quality attribute has been identified as one of the biggest issues that open source software (OSS) has struggled with for more than a decade [1]. Distinctive characteristics of OSS development, such as geographically distributed community [2], diverse background in members [3], asynchronous communication [4], as well as flat organizational structures [5], [6], have shaped the ways how OSS communities consider, identify, and solve usability issues. Understanding how OSS contributors currently address usability in such a distributed collaborative environment will not only help us create an upto-date overall view of OSS usability practice, but such knowledge will also inform new methods and tools for supporting OSS communities in improving the usability of their projects.…”