No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking

Abstract

Modern software development tools such as issue trackers are often complex and multi-purpose tools that provide access to an immense amount of raw information. Unfortunately, developers sometimes feel frustrated when they cannot easily obtain the particular information they need for a given task; furthermore, the constant influx of new data — the vast majority of which is irrelevant to their task at hand — may result in issues being "dropped on the floor". In this paper, we present a developer-centric approach to issue tracking that aims to reduce information overload and improve developers' situational awareness. Our approach is motivated by a grounded theory study of developer comments, which suggests that customized views of a project's repositories that are tailored to developer-specific tasks can help developers better track their progress and understand the surrounding technical context. From the qualitative study, we uncovered a model of the kinds of information elements that are essential for developers in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we built a tool organized around customized issue-tracking dashboards. Further quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrated that this dashboard-like approach to issue tracking can reduce the volume of irrelevant emails by over 99% and also improve support for specific issue-tracking tasks.