mozillaanthropology

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Change Log

When What
May 1st, 2015 Donated by Olga Baysal

Reference

Studies who have been using the data (in any form) are required to include the following reference:

@inproceedings{Baysal:2014:NIL:2635868.2635887,
 author = {Baysal, Olga and Holmes, Reid and Godfrey, Michael W.},
 title = {No Issue Left Behind: Reducing Information Overload in Issue Tracking},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 22Nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering},
 series = {FSE 2014},
 year = {2014},
 isbn = {978-1-4503-3056-5},
 location = {Hong Kong, China},
 pages = {666--677},
 numpages = {12},
 url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2635868.2635887},
 doi = {10.1145/2635868.2635887},
 acmid = {2635887},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 keywords = {Developer dashboards, information needs, issue tracking, personalization, situational awareness},
}

About the Data

Overview of Data

The data consists of the 20 one-hour interviews with key Mozilla developers. These interviews solicited feedback on various aspects of how developers interact with issues throughout their life cycle. The initial data collection was performed as a part of the Mozilla Anthropology project; this project was started in late 2011 to examine how various Mozilla community stakeholders make use of the Bugzilla issue-tracking system, and to gain a sense of how Bugzilla could be improved in the future to better support the rapidly-growing Mozilla community. The main goal of the Anthropology project was to identify trends that could help locate key problem areas with issue management, as well as best practices related to the use of Bugzilla.

Paper 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.