Exploring the use of labels to categorize issues in Open-Source Software projects

Abstract

Reporting bugs, asking for new features and in general giving any kind of feedback is a common way to contribute to an Open-Source Software (OSS) project. This feedback is generally reported in the form of new issues for the project, managed by the so-called issue-trackers. One of the features provided by most issue-trackers is the possibility to define a set of labels/tags to classify the issues and, at least in theory, facilitate their management. Nevertheless, there is little empirical evidence to confirm that taking the time to categorize new issues has indeed a beneficial impact on the project evolution. In this paper we analyze a population of more than three million of GitHub projects and give some insights on how labels are used in them. Our preliminary results reveal that, even if the label mechanism is scarcely used, using labels favors the resolution of issues. Our analysis also suggests that not all projects use labels in the same way (e.g., for some labels are only a way to prioritize the project while others use them to signal their temporal evolution as they move along in the development workflow). Further research is needed to precisely characterize these label "families" and learn more the ideal application scenarios for each of them.

GitHub's milestone tool: A mixed‐methods analysis on its use

“…Recently, many studies have been conducted on the integrated GitHub features and tools, to investigate their adoption and influences. In particular, issue‐tracking systems, an important helper for assisting developers in development and maintenance, have been investigated by many researches . Bissyande et al investigated the use of issue‐tracking systems from 100 000 projects to shed light to many research questions on the involvement of users and developers in reporting issues.…”

“…They found that there is a moderate correlation between the numbers of issues tracked and the numbers of lines of code, and social coding, through the intuitive implementation of project “watching”, has an influence on the prevalence of issue reports. Cabo et al analyzed a population of more than three million of GitHub projects and gave some insights on how labels are used in their issue‐tracking systems. They found that even if the label mechanism is scarcely used, using labels favors the resolution of issues.…”

“…In particular, issue-tracking systems, an important helper for assisting developers in development and maintenance, have been investigated by many researches. [2][3][4]8 Bissyande et al 2 investigated the use of issue-tracking systems from 100 000 projects to shed light to many research questions on the involvement of users and developers in reporting issues. They found that there is a moderate correlation between the numbers of issues tracked and the numbers of lines of code, and social coding, through the intuitive implementation of project "watching", has an influence on the prevalence of issue reports.…”

“…Recently, many researchers have investigated how GitHub features and integrated tools affect the project development productivity and efficiency, eg, issue tracking systems, issue labels, issue links, following, @‐mention, and repository badges . Their research results have emerged a lot of great findings and brought many practical implications to developers to help them better work in the GitHub community with the social coding.…”

Mineração De Informação Em Linguagem Natural Para Apoiar a Elicitação De Requisitos

“…Atualmente, segundo Metz 19 , GitHub possui mais de 35 milhões de projetos open source. Tal abundancia de projetos, vem sendo utilizada recentemente para projetos de pesquisa 20,21,22,23 , os quais, exploram dados relevantes de projetos, como também informações sobre os usuários desenvolvedores, isto devido à peculiaridade de GitHub de conter informação atualizada e transparente. Outro trabalho 24 , mais relacionado à ER, utiliza o GitHub como uma ferramenta para criar e manter rastreabilidade das issues dos projetos.…”