Issue Tracking Ecosystems: Context and Best Practices

TL;DR

This paper explores Issue Tracking Ecosystems (ITEs), analyzing their complexity and diversity through practitioner interviews and archival data, and proposes a Best Practice Ontology to improve understanding and management.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive analysis of ITEs' context-dependent challenges and presents a structured ontology to align research and practice in issue tracking.

Findings

ITE problems are highly context-dependent.

Existing solutions lack consistent framing and comparability.

The proposed ontology aims to standardize best practices.

Abstract

Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs), such as GitHub and Jira, are popular tools that support Software Engineering (SE) organisations through the management of ``issues'', which represent different SE artefacts such as requirements, development tasks, and maintenance items. ITSs also support internal linking between issues, and external linking to other tools and information sources. This provides SE organisations key forms of documentation, including forwards and backwards traceability (e.g., Feature Requests linked to sprint releases and code commits linked to Bug Reports). An Issue Tracking Ecosystem (ITE) is the aggregate of the central ITS and the related SE artefacts, stakeholders, and processes -- with an emphasis on how these contextual factors interact with the ITS. The quality of ITEs is central to the success of these organisations and their software products. There are challenges, however, within ITEs, including complex networks of interlinked artefacts and diverse workflows. While ITSs have been the subject of study in SE research for decades, ITEs as a whole need further exploration. In this thesis, I undertake the challenge of understanding ITEs at a broader level, addressing these questions regarding complexity and diversity. I interviewed practitioners and performed archival analysis on a diverse set of ITSs. These analyses revealed the context-dependent nature of ITE problems, highlighting the need for context-specific ITE research. While previous work has produced many solutions to specific ITS problems, these solutions are not consistently framed in a context-rich and comparable way, leading to a desire for more aligned solutions across research and practice. To address this emergent information and lack of alignment, I created the Best Practice Ontology for ITEs. <... truncated due to arXiv abstract character limit ...>