Issue ownership activity in two large software projects
Bora Çağlayan, Ayşe Bener · ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes · 2012
Issue management is one of the major challenges of software development teams. Balanced workload allocation of developers who are responsible for the maintenance of the software product would impact the long-term reliability of the product. In this paper, we analyse the issue report, issue ownership, and issue resolve patterns of two large software products over a period of time. We use GINI index to estimate the inequalities in issue ownership over time. Our results indicate that a small group of developers tends to take the ownership of a large portion of new issues especially when the active issue count is relatively high in the software development life cycle. We discuss the implications of this trend and propose long-term issue management strategies to deal with them.