Issue Workflow Explorer

Описание: Reporting and resolving issues, often represented by issue workflows recorded in issue
trackers, is an essential part of modern software development.
These tasks are done primarily by volunteers in Open Source Software (OSS) projects
and by software and service providers in commercial projects.
The inflow of issues (and the number of people who resolve them)
may fluctuate and, potentially, overwhelm the project
leaving users with buggy products. To address this challenge, projects
need to adjust their issue resolution policies and
workflows. This can be done well only if practitioners understand
how their issue resolution policies are exercised, how efficient and
effective they are, and how they can be improved.
We use data extracted from issue trackers to measure inflow fluctuations,
discover how the policies change in response, and quantify the impact of these changes.
We build Issue Workflow Explorer (IWE) to visualize issue workflow via linked views
representing properties of issues and issue transitions among statuses.
We illustrate how IWE helps explore three types of policies that are
critical to essential stages of issue workflow, i.e., Triage Policy,
Actionable Issue Policy, and Backlog Issue Policy.
In particular, by applying IWE to GNOME and Mozilla, we detected several problematic policies
and quantified their impact on the accuracy and efficiency of the issue resolving process.