Label it be! A large-scale study of issue labeling in modern open-source repositories

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 and more data are fundamental to solving the issue. For example, labeling the issues could enable users to provide the issue with more contextual information. By understanding how modern issue trackers handle issue labeling, this study analyzes the impact, engagement, and influence that labels have on the Github repositories, based on a database of 10,673,459 issues mined from 13,280 repositories in 180 Github featured topics. We found that 78.75\% of the repositories label their issues, with more adherence from those repositories that contain big numbers of issues. The labeling practice is essential and prioritized as a first step in the issue resolution process in 65.91\% of the first events. Issues with labels draw more attention and impact by collecting more subscribers, assigns, and comments, helping to engage contributors to the resolution.