Automatic Assistance to Reduce Information Overload during Software Issue Report Understanding

Salma Begum Tamanna, Gias Uddin, Junaed Younus Khan, Lan Xia, Longyu Zhang

Modern issue tracking systems are used to log an issue and track it from its inception to closure. Issue reports with diverse discussions from stakeholders can be large and verbose, making them challenging to analyze quickly. Our developer interviews revealed that they struggled with the diverse information in issue reports and demanded automated techniques to classify and summarize information. We designed a tool, iSum (issue summarizer), that helps with the automatic classification and summarization of information types discussed in issue reports. The summarizer offers two views: 1. Developer View takes an issue report as input and outputs visualized summaries of information in the report. 2. Manager View takes a suite of all issue reports under a given software project as inputs and shows the prevalence and trends of different information types across the reports. We evaluated iSum through three studies. 1. In an empirical study over two benchmarks, iSum offers, on average, 11-13% higher F1-scores than state-of-the-art baselines to detect information types. 2. We conducted a user study in task-based setup with 30 developers to determine iSum's effectiveness in issue…