Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
CS590 SEMINAR
Investigation of the Use of Issue Templates in Open Source Software Projects in GitHub
Emre Sülün
Master Student
(Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Dr. Eray Tüzün )
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Abstract: Large-scale open source software projects can have tens of thousands of issues, and issues are usually stored in an issue tracking system like GitHub Issues. However, the unstructured nature of GitHub Issues may cause duplicate, spam or incomplete issue reports that may negatively affect software development and maintenance productivity. Thus, GitHub introduced issue and pull request templates in 2016 aiming to improve the issue handling process. The new feature was adapted by some well-known open source projects, but the use of issue templates was not researched so far and how it affects a software project is unknown. In this study, by mining the software project histories from GitHub, we explore the popularity and acceptance of the issue templates. Moreover, we quantify its impact by researching the correlations between time to resolution, the number of reopened issues and other issue tracking system metrics. In this way, we aim to understand better if using a structured issue template positively affects the issue tracking process for open source projects.
DATE: 11 April 2022, Monday @ 15:50 Zoom