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iLinker: a novel approach for issue knowledge acquisition in GitHub projects

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Abstract

Social coding facilitates the sharing of knowledge in GitHub projects. In particular, issue reports, as an important knowledge in the software development, usually contain relevant information, and can thus be shared and linked in the developers’ discussion to aid the issue resolution. Linking issues to potentially related issues, i.e. issue knowledge acquisition, would provide developers with more targeted resource and information when they search and resolve issues. However, identifying and acquiring related issues is in general challenging, because the real-world acquiring practice is time-consuming and mainly depends on the experience and knowledge of the individual developers. Therefore, acquiring related issues automatically is a meaningful task which can improve development efficiency of GitHub projects. In this paper, we formulate the problem of acquiring related issue knowledge as a recommendation problem. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach, iLinker, combining information retrieval technique, i.e. TF-IDF, and deep learning techniques, i.e. Word Embedding and Document Embedding. Our evaluation results show that, in both coarse-grained recommendation and fine-grained recommendation tasks, iLinker outperforms the baseline approaches.

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Notes

  1. https://github.com/about

  2. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/

  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_embedding

  4. https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub44894

  5. In our dataset, the percentage of developers’ linking duplicate issues is less than 20%: during the analysis, we randomly select 250 link cases from collected data of Request project (with population= 1,110 and confidence level= 95%, the confidence interval\(\simeq \)5.46), and manual check the duplicate relationship between two linked issues by following the strategy used by Ye et al. [31]. The analysis is performed by two coders (first and third author) separately. The inter-rater agreement between the two coders is almost perfect (Fleiss’s Kappa value [32] is 0.83). All authors reviewed and agreed on the final result.

  6. In this study, we use Lancaster stemmer that was implemented by NLTK. Because it works very well in Python programs and it is a very aggressive stemming algorithm with the fastest processing speed. It can reduce our working set of words hugely, which is meaningful for the GitHub projects to quickly train issues data and build practical tools.

  7. https://github.com/moment/moment

  8. https://github.com/request/request

  9. https://github.com/jquery/jquery

  10. https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora

  11. https://github.com/docker/compose

  12. https://github.com/flynn/flynn

  13. https://help.github.com/articles/about-pull-requests/

  14. https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/

  15. https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/timeline/

  16. http://radimrehurek.com/gensim

  17. In our study, for each query issue, we calculate its metric values for NextBug and iLinker. We compute p-value and Cliff’s delta based on all query issues. We use Bonferroni correction to counteract the impact of multiple hypothesis tests.

  18. For each group, the Wilcoxon test results and Cliff’s delta confirm that their differences are significant and substantial.

  19. E.g., https://github.com/request/request/issues/1592

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Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work was supported by A New Generation of Artificial Intelligence 2030 Program (Grant No.2018AAA0102304), National Grand R&D Plan (Grant No. 2018YFB1003903), and National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61432020).

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  1. National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, China

    Yang Zhang, Yiwen Wu, Tao Wang & Huaimin Wang

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  1. Yang Zhang
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Zhang, Y., Wu, Y., Wang, T. et al. iLinker: a novel approach for issue knowledge acquisition in GitHub projects. World Wide Web 23, 1589–1619 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-019-00770-1

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