Practice Evolution Explorer

Reporting and resolving issues is an essential part of software development. This is accomplished primarily by volunteers in OSS projects and by service providers in commercial projects. Project environment often changes, e.g., the number of users may increase, and, to be successful, the projects develop new practices to cope with changes. We want to understand how the issue resolution practices evolve over time, how efficient and effective they are, and how they can be improved. We use ubiquitous records in the issue tracking systems to discover practice evolution and to quantify their impact. We built Practice Evolution Explorer (Pe ) tool to visualize and understand issue tracking data via linked views/selectors representing properties of issues and issue transitions between states. We illustrate how to detect inadequate practices and how to quantify the impact of project decisions on service quality and efficiency. We plan to apply Pe in both commercial and open sources projects to improve the quality of responses to user-reported issues while minimizing the effort needed to achieve that improvement. In particular, we would like to investigate how the commercial projects could achieve the rapid response times observed in OSS. Keywords-Practice evolution; issue resolution time; service quality; issue quality