An Alternative Issue Tracking Dataset of Public Jira Repositories

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, extensive dataset of public Jira repositories, providing valuable data for research on issue tracking, evolution, and cross-tool analysis in software engineering.

Contribution

The paper releases a large, publicly accessible Jira dataset with detailed issue and change data, filling a gap in available repositories for research.

Findings

Dataset includes 16 Jira instances, 1822 projects, 2.7 million issues.

Contains 32 million changes, 9 million comments, and 1 million issue links.

Enables new research opportunities in issue evolution and cross-tool analysis.

Abstract

Organisations use issue tracking systems (ITSs) to track and document their projects' work in units called issues. This style of documentation encourages evolutionary refinement, as each issue can be independently improved, commented on, linked to other issues, and progressed through the organisational workflow. Commonly studied ITSs so far include GitHub, GitLab, and Bugzilla, while Jira, one of the most popular ITS in practice with a wealth of additional information, has yet to receive similar attention. Unfortunately, diverse public Jira datasets are rare, likely due to the difficulty in finding and accessing these repositories. With this paper, we release a dataset of 16 public Jiras with 1822 projects, spanning 2.7 million issues with a combined total of 32 million changes, 9 million comments, and 1 million issue links. We believe this Jira dataset will lead to many fruitful research projects investigating issue evolution, issue linking, cross-project analysis, as well as cross-tool analysis when combined with existing well-studied ITS datasets.