In agile software development projects, software engineers prioritize implementation over documentation. Is the cost of missing documentation greater than the cost of producing unnecessary or unused documentation? Agile software engineers must still maintain other software artifacts, such as tickets in an issue tracking system or source code committed to a version control system (VCS). Do these artifacts contain useful knowledge? In this paper, we examine undocumented knowledge in a multi-case exploratory case study of industrial agile software development projects. The first is an internal project with 159 source code commits and roughly 8000 lines of code. The second is an external project with 760 source code commits and roughly 50,000 lines of code. We introduce a ticket-commit network chart (TCC) that visually represents time-series commit activities along with filed issue tickets. We also implement a tool to generate the TCC using both commit log and ticket data. Our case study revealed that software engineers committed source code to the VCS without a corresponding issue ticket in a non-trivial minority of instances. If these commits were based on and linked to individual issue tickets, then these “unissued” tickets would have accounted for a non-trivial minority (5–21%) of the knowledge needed for future software modification and operations. End users and requirements engineers also evaluated the contents of these commits. They found that the omission of links to individual tickets had an important impact on future software modification or operation with between 22 and 49% of these instances resulting in undocumented knowledge.

中文翻译：

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通过敏捷软件开发活动的可视化发现未记录的知识

在敏捷软件开发项目中，软件工程师优先考虑实现而不是文档。丢失文档的成本是否大于生成不必要或未使用的文档的成本？敏捷软件工程师仍然必须维护其他软件工件，例如问题跟踪系统中的票证或提交给版本控制系统 (VCS) 的源代码。这些文物是否包含有用的知识？在本文中，我们在工业敏捷软件开发项目的多案例探索性案例研究中检查未记录的知识。第一个是一个内部项目，有 159 次源代码提交和大约 8000 行代码。第二个是一个外部项目，有 760 次源代码提交和大约 50,000 行代码。我们引入了一个工单提交网络图 (TCC)，它直观地表示时间序列提交活动以及提交的问题单。我们还实现了一个工具来使用提交日志和票证数据生成 TCC。我们的案例研究表明，在少数情况下，软件工程师在没有相应问题单的情况下将源代码提交给 VCS。如果这些提交基于并链接到单独的问题单，那么这些“未发行”的问题单将占未来软件修改和操作所需知识的重要少数 (5-21%)。最终用户和需求工程师还评估了这些提交的内容。