Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
M.S.THESİS PRESENTATİON
An Empirical Analysis of Issue Templates on GitHub
Emre Sülün
Master Student
(Supervisor: Asst. Prof. Eray Tüzün )
Computer Engineering Department
Bilkent University
Abstract: Many open-source software projects use GitHub Issues for issue tracking. Unlike other issue trackers, the initial versions of GitHub Issues were highly flexible and had no standard way of using it. Its unstructured nature may have made it prone to incomplete issue reports that may negatively affect software development and maintenance productivity. To potentially address these problems, GitHub introduced issue templates in 2016, and many projects started to use this feature. This thesis aims to reflect the current status of issue template usage by mining open-source projects. We evaluated 350 templates and their previous versions from 100 popular open-source projects. We also analyzed 1,830,314 issues to understand their conformance to templates and the impact of issue templates. Lastly, we conducted a survey with open-source software maintainers to understand their opinions about issue templates. We found that issue templates are almost always used (99 out of 100 projects). The historical analysis suggests that issue forms, which are more structured issue templates, started to gain popularity over vanilla issue templates. We also observed that issues created when the project has an issue template are resolved faster and have less number of comments. According to the survey, project maintainers agree with the benefits and they believe issue templates construct a balanced midpoint between the flexibility of vanilla issues and the strictness of other issue tracking systems such as Jira. Lastly, we share our suggestions for project maintainers, contributors, and GitHub to further improve this process.
DATE: 18 January 2023, Wednesday @ 15:00 Place:EA 409