Authors: Olga Baysal Reid Holmes Michael W. Godfrey
Venue: FSE 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 666–677, 2014
Year: 2014
Abstract: Modern software development tools such as issue trackers are often complex and multi-purpose tools that provide access to an immense amount of raw information. Unfortunately, developers sometimes feel frustrated when they cannot easily obtain the particular information they need for a given task; furthermore, the constant influx of new data— the vast majority of which is irrelevant to their task at hand— may result in issues being "dropped on the floor". In this paper, we present a developer-centric approach to issue tracking that aims to reduce information overload and improve developers' situational awareness. Our approach is motivated by a grounded theory study of developer comments, which suggests that customized views of a project's repositories that are tailored to developer-specific tasks can help developers better track their progress and understand the surrounding technical context. From the qualitative study, we uncovered a model of the kinds of information elements that are essential for developers in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we built a tool organized around customized issue-tracking dashboards. Further quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrated that this dashboard-like approach to issue tracking can reduce the volume of irrelevant emails by over 99% and also improve support for specific issue-tracking tasks.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{olgabaysal2014nilbrioiit,
author = "Olga Baysal and Reid Holmes and Michael W. Godfrey",
title = "No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking",
year = "2014",
pages = "666–677",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering"
}
Plain Text:
Olga Baysal, Reid Holmes, and Michael W. Godfrey, "No issue left behind: reducing information overload in issue tracking," 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 666–677