Visual Analysis Of Github Issues To Gain Insights

Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools, including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct link between issues and commits, making it difficult for developers to understand how specific issues are resolved. Although GitHub’s Insights page provides some visualization for repository data, the representation of issues and commits related data in a textual format hampers quick evaluation of issue management. This paper presents a prototype web application that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts vital information to enhance users’ understanding of development patterns in their projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository information more efficiently and rapidly.

Rifat Ara Proma, and Paul Rosen. Visual Analysis Of Github Issues To Gain Insights. arXiv Preprint, 2024.

@article{proma2024git,
  title = {Visual Analysis of GitHub Issues to Gain Insights},
  author = {Proma, Rifat Ara and Rosen, Paul},
  journal = {arXiv Preprint},
  year = {2024},
  abstract = {Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub
    emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools,
    including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct link between
    issues and commits, making it difficult for developers to understand how specific issues
    are resolved. Although GitHub's Insights page provides some visualization for repository
    data, the representation of issues and commits related data in a textual format hampers
    quick evaluation of issue management. This paper presents a prototype web application
    that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals
    different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts
    vital information to enhance users' understanding of development patterns in their
    projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies
    involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user
    evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository
    information more efficiently and rapidly.}
}