Label it be! A large-scale study of issue labeling in modern open-source repositories
Joselito J\'unior, Gl\'aucya Boechat, Ivan Machado

TL;DR
This study analyzes how issue labeling in large-scale open-source repositories on GitHub influences community engagement, issue resolution, and project management, based on extensive data from over 10 million issues across thousands of repositories.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of issue labeling practices in modern open-source projects, highlighting their prevalence and impact on community participation and issue resolution.
Findings
78.75% of repositories use issue labels
Labels are prioritized as a first step in issue resolution in 65.91% of cases
Issues with labels attract more subscribers, comments, and assignments
Abstract
In a wave of growth, open-source projects need to modernize and change how they deal with processes, methods, and communication with their contributors. We could observe that open-source projects are constantly evolving to improve their management of the entire community. Starting with community communication, software development, managing open-source projects faces crucial challenges. One of the enabling environments that open-source communities found to achieve community communications objectives was code repositories with integration with issue trackers. Using issue trackers in their projects should encompass an infrastructure capable of hosting the project source code and community participation. Some issue trackers use a structure in which the issue's title and description are the key information. However, we have observed a slight change in this strategy over the years, as more…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Scientific Computing and Data Management · Open Source Software Innovations
