Predicting the Objective and Priority of Issue Reports in Software Repositories

Abstract

Proper documentation plays an important role in successful software management and maintenance. Software repositories such as GitHub host a large number of software entities. Developers collaboratively discuss, implement, use, and share these entities. Users exploit Issue Tracking Systems, a facility of software repositories, to keep track of issue reports, to manage the workload and processes, and finally, to document the highlight of their team's effort. An issue report can contain a reported problem, a request for new features, or merely a question about the software product. As the number of these issues increases, it becomes harder to manage them manually. GitHub provides labels for tagging issues, as a means of issue management. However, about half of the issues in GitHub's top 1000 repositories do not have any labels.In this work, we aim at automating the process of managing issue reports for software teams. We propose a two-stage approach to predict both the objective behind opening an issue and its priority level using feature engineering methods and stateof-the-art text classifiers. We train and evaluate our models in both project-based and cross-project settings. The latter approach provides a generic prediction model applicable for any unseen software project or projects with little historical data. Our proposed approach can successfully predict the objective and priority level of issue reports with 83% and 75% accuracy, respectively.

A Versatile Dataset of Agile Open Source Software Projects

“…An important research topic in Requirement Engineering is requirement prioritization [4,16,31] and, especially in an agile setting, the selection of issues for the next iteration [10,19]. The TAWOS dataset can support such studies by providing a large collection of issues, with known priorities and iterations (i.e., Sprints and Releases) coupled with various aspects providing a full-picture view of the issues, projects and assignees.…”