Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use

Davide Falessi, Freddy Hernandez, Foaad Khosmood

2018

Abstract

An Issue Tracking System (ITS) allows a developer to keep track of, prioritize, and assign multitudes of bugs, feature requests, and other development tasks such as testing. Despite ITSs play a significant role in day-to-day developers’ activities, no previous study investigated what developers want and use in an ITS. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a feature matrix that maps six of the most used ITS to features, and second, we measure the developers’ level of use and perceived importance of each feature. This knowledge has multiple benefits such as supporting the decision of the ITS to use and revealing promising areas of research and development. Specifically, quality improvement effort should target improving functionality in use, and development effort should target supporting functionalities needed. In this paper, we define and extract ten core ITS features and asked more than a hundred developers to rate their importance and use. Our results show that Advanced Search and Flexible Notifications are the most important features. Moreover, results show that no feature has been used by more than 90% of the respondents. Another interesting finding is that 27% of respondents rate Workflow Automation as a useful or required feature, despite having never used it themselves; this suggests the need to better training, exposure or of availability of ITS features. In conclusion, our results pave the way to significant research and development effort on ITS.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hernandez F. and Khosmood F. (2018). Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use.In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT, ISBN 978-989-758-320-9, pages 543-548. DOI: 10.5220/0006818405430548

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icsoft18,
author={Freddy Hernandez and Foaad Khosmood},
title={Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,},
year={2018},
pages={543-548},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0006818405430548},
isbn={978-989-758-320-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Software Technologies - Volume 1: ICSOFT,
TI - Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use
SN - 978-989-758-320-9
AU - Hernandez F.
AU - Khosmood F.
PY - 2018
SP - 543
EP - 548
DO - 10.5220/0006818405430548