Automated issue assignment using topic modelling on Jira issue tracking data

Abstract As more and more software teams use online issue tracking systems to collaborate on software projects, the accurate assignment of new issues to the most suitable contributors may have significant impact on the success of the project. As a result, several research efforts have been directed...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Themistoklis Diamantopoulos, Nikolaos Saoulidis, Andreas Symeonidis
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Wiley 2023-06-01
Series:IET Software
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1049/sfw2.12129
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Summary:Abstract As more and more software teams use online issue tracking systems to collaborate on software projects, the accurate assignment of new issues to the most suitable contributors may have significant impact on the success of the project. As a result, several research efforts have been directed towards automating this process to save considerable time and effort. However, most approaches focus mainly on software bugs and employ models that do not sufficiently take into account the semantics and the non‐textual metadata of issues and/or produce models that may require manual tuning. A methodology that extracts both textual and non‐textual features from different types of issues is designed, providing a Jira dataset that involves not only bugs but also new features, issues related to documentation, patches, etc. Moreover, the semantics of issue text are effectively captured by employing a topic modelling technique that is optimised using the assignment result. Finally, this methodology aggregates probabilities from a set of individual models to provide the final assignment. Upon evaluating this approach in an automated issue assignment setting using a dataset of Jira issues, the authors conclude that it can be effective for automated issue assignment.
ISSN:1751-8806
1751-8814