Dane Bertram
Saul Greenberg
Robert Walker
ABSTRACT
Issue tracking systems help organizations manage issue reporting, assignment, tracking, resolution, and archiving. Traditionally, it is the Software Engineering community that researches issue tracking systems, where software defects are reported and tracked as 'bug reports' within an archival database. Yet, as issue tracking is fundamentally a social process, it is important to understand the design and use of issue tracking systems from that perspective. Consequently, we conducted a qualitative study of issue tracking systems as used by small, collocated software development teams. We found that an issue tracker is not just a database for tracking bugs, features, and inquiries, but also a focal point for communication and coordination for many stakeholders within and beyond the software team. Customers, project managers, quality assurance personnel, and programmers all contribute to the shared knowledge and persistent communication that exists within the issue tracking system. These results were all the more striking because in spite of teams being collocated--which afforded frequent, face-to-face communication--the issue tracker was still used as a fundamental communication channel. We articulate various real-world practices surrounding issue trackers and offer design considerations for future systems.
- Ackerman, M. and Halverson, C. Considering an organization's memory. Proc ACM CSCW (1998), 39--48 Google Scholar
Digital Library
- Anvik, J., Hiew, L., and Murphy, G.C. Who should fix this bug? Proc. ICSE 2006, ACM Press (2006), 361--370. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aranda, J. & Venolia, G. The secret life of bugs: Going past the errors and omissions in software repositories. Proc. ICSE 2009, ACM Press (2009). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bettenburg, N., Just, S., Schröter, A., Weiss, C., Premraj, R., and Zimmermann, T. What makes a good bug report? Proc. FSE 2008, ACM Press (2008), 308--318. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Churchill, E.F., Trevor, J., Bly, S., Nelson, L., and Cubranic, D. Anchored conversations: Chatting in the context of a document. Proc. ACM CHI (2000), 454--461. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Corbin, J. and Strauss, A. Basics of qualitative research (3rd Ed.). Sage Publications, Los Angeles, 2008.Google Scholar
- Dingsøyr, T. and Røyrvik, E. An empirical study of an informal knowledge repository in a medium-sized software consulting company. Proc. ICSE 2003, IEEE Computer Society (2003), 84--92. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Erickson, T., Smith, D., Kellogg, W., Laff, M., Richards, J., and Bradner, E. Socially translucent conversations: Social proxies, persistent conversation, and the design of "Babble." Proc. ACM CHI (1999), 72--79. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Fenton, N. and Neil, M. A critique of software defect prediction models. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 25, 5 (1999), 675--689. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Grinter, R. Using a configuration management tool to coordinate software development. Proc. ACM COCS (1995), 168--177. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Halverson, C. Ellis, J., Danis, C. and Kellogg, W. Designing task visualizations to support the coordination of work in software development. Proc. ACM CSCW (2006), 39--48. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Hollan, J., Hutchins, E. and Kirsh, D. Distributed cognition: Toward a new foundation for human-computer interaction research. ACM TOCHI, 7(2), (2000), 174--196. Google ScholarDigital Library
- LaToza, T., Venolia, G., and DeLine, R. Maintaining mental models: A study of developer work habits. Proc. ICSE 2006, ACM Press (2006), 492--501. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S., and Bradner, E. Interaction and outeraction: Instant messaging in action. Proc. ACM CSCW (2000), 79--88. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Perry, D.E., Staudenmayer, N., and Votta, L.G. People, organizations, and process improvement. IEEE Software, 11, 4 (1994), 36--45. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pressman, R.S., Software engineering: A practitioner's approach (6th Ed.), New York, McGraw-Hill, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reis, C.R. and de Mattos Fortes, R.P. An overview of the software engineering process and tools in the Mozilla project. Proc. Workshop Open Source Software Development, U. Newcastle upon Tyne (2002), 155--175.Google Scholar
- Sandusky, R. & Gasser, L. Negotiation and the coordination of information and activity in distributed software problem management, Proc. ACM GROUP (2005), 187--196. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Schmidt, K. and Simone, C. Coordination mechanisms: Towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design. CSCW: J. Collaborative Computing 5, (1996), 155--200. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Star, S.L. and Griesemer, J.R. Institutional ecology, 'translations' and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907--39. Social Studies of Science 19, 3 (1989), 387--420.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Ye, Y. Supporting software development as knowledge-intensive and collaborative activity. Proc. ACM WISER (2006), 15--22. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams
Recommendations
DeepLabel: Automated Issue Classification for Issue Tracking Systems
Internetware '22: Proceedings of the 13th Asia-Pacific Symposium on InternetwareWith the growth of Issue Tracking Systems, issue reports have become an important data to aid software maintenance and evaluation. Issue classification is one of the most important methods for such purpose, which aims to automatically distinguish ...
On the feasibility of automated prediction of bug and non-bug issues
AbstractContextIssue tracking systems are used to track and describe tasks in the development process, e.g., requested feature improvements or reported bugs. However, past research has shown that the reported issue types often do not match the description ...
Group cognition: the collaborative locus of agency in CSCL
CSCL '05: Proceedings of th 2005 conference on Computer support for collaborative learning: learning 2005: the next 10 years!CSCL faces the challenge of not only designing educational technologies and interventions, but of inventing analytic methodologies and theoretical frameworks appropriate to the unique character of collaborative learning as an interactional group ...
Comments