Connecting GitHub Issues with Commits in Open Source Software Projects

Abstract

In the current state of software development a common way to manage and contribute to an Open Source Software Project is to use Version Control Systems. GitHub, one of the largest hosting services for Open Source projects, provides an issue-tracking system allowing users and developers to report issues and offer solutions. Further, developers can assign different labels to an issue, which helps categorize it, as well as, provide basic characteristics. This method could be time and cost inefficient. Lack of connection between issues and commits could lead to Technical Debt by causing developers to return to issues to resolve them. In GitHub, there is no semantic connection expressing an issue to a commit that solves and eventually closes the issue. This lack of connection has a major drawback as tools analyzing meta-data for project measures related to issues and commits cannot be processed. For example, if we want to check whether there is a significant difference among the size of fixes of issues of different types; it is not possible to determine until we have established a connection between issues and commits. This study aims to explore connection between issues and commits, in order to make them traceable. A theoretical framework is developed to target the RQ. The theoretical framework for the research will establish the factors for a possible relation between issues and commits.