An Empirical Study of Delays in the Integration of Addressed Issues

Authors: Daniel Alencar da Costa Surafel Lemma Abebe Shane McIntosh Uira Kulesza Ahmed E. Hassan

Venue: ICSME   2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pp. 281-290, 2014

Year: 2014

Abstract: Predicting the time required to address an issue (i.e., a feature, bug fix, or enhancement) has long been the goal of many software engineering researchers. However, after an issue has been addressed, it must be integrated into an official release to become visible to users. In theory, issues should be integrated into releases soon after they are addressed. Yet in practice, the integration of an addressed issue might be delayed. For instance, an addressed issue might be delayed in order to assess the impact that it may have on the system as a whole. While one can often speculate, it is not always clear why some addressed issues are integrated immediately, while others are delayed. In this paper, we empirically study the integration of 20,995 addressed issues from the Argo UML, Eclipse, and Fire fox projects. Our results indicate that: (i) despite being addressed well before the release date, the integration of 34% to 60% of addressed issues in systems with traditional release cycle, and 98% of addressed issues in systems with rapid release cycle were delayed by one or more releases, (ii) using information derived from the addressed issues, we are able to accurately predict the release in which an addressed issue will be integrated, achieving a Receiver Operator Curve (ROC) area of above 0.74, and (iii) the workload of integrators is the most influential factor in our integration delay models. Our results indicate that integration can introduce non-negligible delays that prevent addressed issues from being delivered to users. Thus, solely focusing on the time to address an issue is not enough to truly assess how long it takes for users to see that the issue has been addressed in the software system.

BibTeX:

@inproceedings{danielalencardacosta2014aesoditioai,
    author = "Daniel Alencar da Costa and Surafel Lemma Abebe and Shane McIntosh and Uira Kulesza and Ahmed E. Hassan",
    title = "An Empirical Study of Delays in the Integration of Addressed Issues",
    year = "2014",
    pages = "281-290",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution"
}

Plain Text:

Daniel Alencar da Costa, Surafel Lemma Abebe, Shane McIntosh, Uira Kulesza, and Ahmed E. Hassan, "An Empirical Study of Delays in the Integration of Addressed Issues," 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pp. 281-290