No Issue Left Behind: Reducing Information Overload in Issue Tracking

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 ap-proach is motivated by a grounded theory study of devel-oper 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 un-derstand the surrounding technical context. From the qual-itative study, we uncovered a model of the kinds of informa-tion elements that are essential for developers in completing their daily tasks, and from this model we built a tool or-ganized around customized issue-tracking dashboards. Fur-ther quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrated that this dashboard-like approach to issue tracking can re-duce the volume of irrelevant emails by over 99 % and also improve support for specific issue-tracking tasks