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Communication, collaboration, and bugs: the social nature of issue tracking in small, collocated teams

Published: 06 February 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Issue tracking systems help organizations manage issue reporting, assignment, tracking, resolution, and archiving. Traditionally, it is the Software Engineering community that researches issue tracking systems, where software defects are reported and tracked as 'bug reports' within an archival database. Yet, as issue tracking is fundamentally a social process, it is important to understand the design and use of issue tracking systems from that perspective. Consequently, we conducted a qualitative study of issue tracking systems as used by small, collocated software development teams. We found that an issue tracker is not just a database for tracking bugs, features, and inquiries, but also a focal point for communication and coordination for many stakeholders within and beyond the software team. Customers, project managers, quality assurance personnel, and programmers all contribute to the shared knowledge and persistent communication that exists within the issue tracking system. These results were all the more striking because in spite of teams being collocated--which afforded frequent, face-to-face communication--the issue tracker was still used as a fundamental communication channel. We articulate various real-world practices surrounding issue trackers and offer design considerations for future systems.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
February 2010
468 pages
ISBN:9781605587950
DOI:10.1145/1718918
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 February 2010

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Author Tags

  1. issue tracking
  2. shared knowledge
  3. software engineering

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CSCW '10
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CSCW '10: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 6 - 10, 2010
Georgia, Savannah, USA

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  • (2024)Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information CapturedProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3623330(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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