Visual Analysis of GitHub Issues to Gain Insights

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visualization tool for GitHub issues that enhances understanding of issue lifecycle and project management by providing visual insights, validated through case studies and user evaluation.

Contribution

A novel web application that visualizes GitHub issue data to improve comprehension of issue resolution processes and project development patterns.

Findings

Effective visualization of issue timelines improves understanding.

User evaluation shows increased efficiency in issue analysis.

Case studies demonstrate practical utility of the tool.

Abstract

Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools, including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct link between issues and commits, making it difficult for developers to understand how specific issues are resolved. Although GitHub's Insights page provides some visualization for repository data, the representation of issues and commits related data in a textual format hampers quick evaluation of issue management. This paper presents a prototype web application that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts vital information to enhance users' understanding of development patterns in their projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository information more efficiently and rapidly.