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Social capital is an asset earned by people through their social connections. One of the motivations among developers to contribute to open source development and maintenance tasks is to earn social capital. Recent studies suggest that the social capital of the project has an impact on the sustained participation of the developers in open source software (OSS). One way to improve the social capital of the project is to help the developers in connecting with their peers. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is no prior research which attempts to predict future collaborations among developers and establish the significance of these collaborations on improving the social capital at the project level. To address this research gap, in this paper, we model the past collaborations among developers on version control system (VCS) and issue tracking system (ITS) as homogeneous and heterogeneous developer social network (DSN). Along with the novel path count based features, defined on proposed heterogeneous DSN, multifaceted proximity features are used to generate a feature set for machine learning classifiers. Ourexperiments performed on 5 popular open source projects (Spark, Kafka, Flink, WildFly, Hibernate) indicate that the proposed approach can predict the future collaborations among developers on both the platformsi.e. VCS as well as ITS with a significant accuracy (AUROC up to 0.85 and 0.9 for VCS and ITS respectively). A generic metric- recall of gain in social capital is proposed to investigate the efficacy of these predicted collaborations in improving the social capital of the project. We also concretised this metric on various measures of social capital and found that collaborations predicted by our approach have significant potential to improve the social capital at project level (e.g. Recall of gain in cohesion index up to 0.98 and Recall of gain in average godfather index up to 0.99 for VCS). We also showed that structure of collaboration network has an impact on the accuracy and usefulness of predicted collaborations. Since the past research suggests that many newcomers abandon the open source project due to social barriers which they face after joining the project, our research outcomes can be used to build the recommendation systems which might help to retain such developers by improving their social ties based on similar skills/interests.

Technical debt is a metaphor indicating sub-optimal solutions implemented for short-term benefits by sacrificing the long-term maintainability and evolvability of software. A special type of technical debt is explicitly admitted by software engineers (e.g. using a TODO comment); this is called Self-Admitted Technical Debt or SATD. Most work on automatically identifying SATD focuses on source code comments. In addition to source code comments, issue tracking systems have shown to be another rich source of SATD, but there are no approaches specifically for automatically identifying SATD in issues. In this paper, we first create a training dataset by collecting and manually analyzing 4,200 issues (that break down to 23,180 sections of issues) from seven open-source projects (i.e., Camel, Chromium, Gerrit, Hadoop, HBase, Impala, and Thrift) using two popular issue tracking systems (i.e., Jira and Google Monorail). We then propose and optimize an approach for automatically identifying SATD in issue tracking systems using machine learning. Our findings indicate that: 1) our approach outperforms baseline approaches by a wide margin with regard to the F1-score; 2) transferring knowledge from suitable datasets can improve the predictive performance of our approach; 3) extracted SATD keywords are intuitive and potentially indicating types and indicators of SATD; 4) projects using different issue tracking systems have less common SATD keywords compared to projects using the same issue tracking system; 5) a small amount of training data is needed to achieve good accuracy., Accepted for publication in the EMSE journal

Technical debt refers to taking shortcuts to achieve short-term goals, which might negatively influence software maintenance in the long-term. There is increasing attention on technical debt that is admitted by developers in source code comments (termed as self-admitted technical debt or SATD). But SATD in issue trackers is relatively unexplored. We performed a case study, where we manually examined 500 issues from two open source projects (i.e. Hadoop and Camel), which contained 152 SATD items. We found that: 1) eight types of technical debt are identified in issues, namely architecture, build, code, defect, design, documentation, requirement, and test debt; 2) developers identify technical debt in issues in three different points in time, and a small part is identified by its creators; 3) the majority of technical debt is paid off, 4) mostly by those who identified it or created it; 5) the median time and average time to repay technical debt are 872.3 and 25.0 hours respectively., Comment: The 46th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)

Software development is a complex and creative process. In contrast to a typical business process it tends to be more dynamic and dependent on a number of circumstances. Empirical studies show that companies still don’t document their development practices, or if they do, these are not up-to-date and do not reflect how they really develop software. On the other hand, various supporting tools such as issue tracking system, revision control system, document management system, etc. are used by developers and project managers during their work, capturing a vast body of knowledge about how a software development process has been performed. The main objective of this dissertation is to propose an approach that can help companies in documenting their real development practice. Comparing to existing approaches that require substantial effort on the side of project members, our approach extracts information on development practice directly from software repositories. Five companies have been studied to identify information that can be retrieved from software repositories. Based on this, an approach to reconstruct development practice has been developed. The approach has been evaluated on a real software repository shared by an additional company. The results confirm that software repository information suffice for the reconstruction of various aspects of development process, i.e. disciplines, activities, user roles, and artifacts. Razvoj programske opreme je kompleksen in ustvarjalen proces. V primerjavi s tipičnim poslovnim procesom je bolj dinamičen in odvisen od številnih okoliščin. Empirične študije kažejo, da podjetja še vedno ne dokumentirajo svoje razvojne prakse, če pa že, le-te ne vzdržujejo in posledično ne odražajo, kako dejansko razvijajo programsko opremo. Po drugi strani pa razvijalci in vodje projektov med svojim delom uporabljajo različna podporna orodja, kot so sistem za sledenje zahtevkom, sistem za nadzor verzij, sistem za upravljanje dokumentov, itd., ki zajamejo veliko znanja o tem, kako je bil izveden proces razvoja programske opreme. Glavni cilj pričujoče disertacije je predlagati pristop, ki lahko pomaga podjetjem pri dokumentiranju njihove dejanske razvojne prakse. V primerjavi z obstoječimi pristopi, ki zahtevajo veliko napora na strani članov projekta, naš pristop rekonstruira informacije o razvojni praksi neposredno iz programskih repozitorijev. Na podlagi podatkov petih podjetij so bile identificirane informacije, ki jih je mogoče pridobiti iz programskih repozitorijev. Na podlagi tega je bil razvit pristop za rekonstrukcijo razvojne prakse. Pristop je bil evalviran na resničnem programskem repozitoriju, ki ga je zagotovilo dodatno podjetje. Rezultati potrjujejo, da informacije iz programskih repozitorijev zadostujejo za rekonstrukcijo različnih vidikov razvojnega procesa, tj. disciplin, aktivnosti, uporabniških vlog in artefaktov.

Issue tracking systems are used, in most software projects, but in particular in almost all free open source software, to record many different kinds of issues: bug reports, feature requests, maintenance tickets and even design discussions. Identifying which of those issues are bug reports is not a trivial task. When researchers want to conduct studies on the bug reports, managed by a software development project, first of all they need to perform this identification.\\ The job for researchers here is very different from the bug triaging that researchers do. In the latter case, people with a considerate experience in the project make a decision based on the information available at that time (maybe just a short comment by some user), asking, if needed, for more details. In the former case, researchers usually have not that experience in the project, but they have at their use all the information produced, until the moment the issue was closed. This may include not only all comments and actions on the issue tracking system, but for example, discussions about a fix in the code review system, or the final fixing patch in the source code management system. Having all that information conveyed to the researchers, in an easy, flexible and quick way, accelerates and makes their decision process much more reliable. It simplifies large scale manual analysis of issues (in hundreds or thousands), helping researchers to ensure that they are really working with what they intend to work: bug reports.\\ This paper presents a tool designed to solve exactly the problem of providing the researchers with all the relevant information needed to decide whether an issue corresponds to a bug report or not. The tool uses information extracted automatically from the projects repositories. It offers a web-based interface which allows collaboration, traceability and transparency of the identification of bug reports. All this makes the process easier, faster, and more reliable.

For software maintenance, bug reports provide useful information to developers because they can be used for various tasks such as debugging and understanding previous changes. However, as they are typically written in the form of conversations among developers, bug reports tend to be unnecessarily long and verbose, with the consequence that developers often have difficulties reading or understanding bug reports. To mitigate this problem, methods that automatically generate a summary of bug reports have been proposed, and various related studies have been conducted. However, existing bug report summarization methods have not fully exploited the inherent characteristics of bug reports. In this paper, we propose a bug report summarization method that uses the weighted-PageRank algorithm and exploits the 'duplicates&rsquo, &lsquo, blocks&rsquo, and &lsquo, depends-on&rsquo, relationships between bug reports. The experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art method in terms of both the quality of the summary and the number of applicable bug reports.

Diplomsko delo obravnava razvoj programske rešitve za evidentiranje zahtevkov, ki bo delovala kot storitev v oblaku za mikro podjetja z do deset zaposlenimi. Za razvoj smo uporabili brezplačna orodja, gradniki programske rešitve pa tudi za poslovno uporabo niso obremenjeni z licenco. Programska rešitev omogoča vsakokraten vpogled v trenutno stanje izvajanja zahtevkov in dokumentov na enem mestu in je uporabna predvsem za podjetja, ki se ukvarjajo z izobraževanjem, izpopolnjevanjem in usposabljanjem. Izdelana je s pomočjo programskega jezika PHP in podatkovne zbirke MySQL znotraj WAMP strežnika in je bila s strani naročnika tudi testirana. Jeseni je predvidena uporaba rešitve s strani naročnika. The diploma thesis discusses the development of a software solution for issue tracking that will work as a cloud-based service for micro companies with up to ten employees. Freely available tools were used for the development, while the building parts of the software solution are license-free also for commercial use. The software solution enables real-time insight into the current state of issue execution and documents in one place and is useful especially for the companies that deal with education and training courses. The software solution is based on the PHP programming language and MySQL database that use the WAMP server, and was also tested by the client who was offered this solution. The solution is expected to be used by the client in autumn.

Dissertação de Mestrado em Controlo de Gestão apresentada à ESTG - Escola Superior de Tecnologia e Gestão do Instituto Politécnico de Leiria. A constante evolução e diversificação dos equipamentos eletrónicos no sector médico tornam, cada vez mais difíceis, os procedimentos corretivos e preventivos realizados pelos departamentos de assistência técnica. De modo a poder melhorar a qualidade do serviço de assistência técnica, algumas empresas, leaders mundiais do sector, adotaram um sistema informático de apoio aos seus departamentos técnicos, designado por Issue Tracking System (ITS). Os ITS estão presentes em diversos sectores industriais, tal como o sector automóvel, aeronáutica, aeroespacial e informático. No entanto, raros são os ITS orientados para as empresas de apoio técnico do sector da saúde, sendo que os existentes, foram especialmente concebidos pelas próprias empresas de desenvolvimento de aparelhos médicos. Consequentemente, esses ITS não foram desenvolvidos para uma realidade multimarca e não estão adaptados aos mercados de língua portuguesa. Neste contexto, justifica-se a elaboração de um ITS em português, orientado para empresas que operam em equipamentos multimarca do sector da saúde, a sua implementação no sector e a avaliação das melhorias que tal ferramenta possa acrescentar no seio de um departamento técnico especializado em equipamentos de saúde, sendo esses, os principais objetivos deste Projeto. Os resultados preliminares do projeto indicam que um ITS multimarca, em português e orientado para o sector da saúde, pode melhorar os tempos de respostas das intervenções técnicas, permitindo assim uma redução dos custos do departamento e criando uma vantagem competitiva, vantagem essa, realçada em empresas de assistência técnica multimarcas. The constant evolution and diversification of electronic equipments in the health care sector, makes increasingly difficult, the corrective and preventive procedures performed by technical support departments. In order to improve the quality of technical service, some companies, global leaders in this industry, have adopted an information technology system to support its technical departments, called Issue Tracking System (ITS). ITS are present in various industrial sectors such as automotive, aeronautics, aerospace and computer. However, there are very few ITS oriented for services of technical support in the health care sector, and the existing ones, have been specially designed by the very same companies of medical device development. Consequently, these ITS are not designed for a multi-brand reality and are not adapted to the Portuguese-speaking markets. In this context, it is appropriate to draw up an ITS in Portuguese, focused on multi-brand companies in the health care sector, its implementation in the sector and the assessment of the improvements that this tool can add within a specialized technical department of medical equipment, these, being the main objectives of this Project. Preliminary results of the project indicate that an ITS multi-brand in Portuguese and oriented to the health sector, can improve the intervention times of technical services, allowing a reduction of department costs and creating a competitive advantage, this advantage, highlighted in multi-brand organizations.

Veliko podjetij, ki nudi podporo uporabnikom, le-to izvaja ročno ali s pomočjo računalniških preglednic. V diplomskem delu je izveden postopek informatizacije podpore uporabnikom. S pomočjo modela informatizacije in analize obstoječih orodij je izdelana programska rešitev sistema za podporo uporabnikom. Rezultat naloge je programska rešitev sistema za sledenje napakam. Praktičen primer uporabe rešitve je prikazan na primeru aplikacije Helpdesk, ki jo uporablja Bolnišnica Golnik. Informatizacija sistema za podporo uporabnikom omogoča avtomatizacijo določenih procesov in izboljšuje izrabo človeških virov, ki se zaradi razbremenitve z administrativnimi procesi lahko učinkoviteje ukvarjajo s samim procesom reševanja določenih zahtev. Many companies, that offer helpdesk support, do it manually or using computer worksheets. A proces of informatization of helpdesk system is created in the diploma. Using an informatization model with analysis of different development tools can help creating a software solution for user helpdesk support. The result of the diploma is a software solution for issue tracking system. Practical example of several processes is shown on the application Helpdesk, that is used in the institute Bolnišnica Golnik. The informatization of helpdesk allows users to automate certain processes and improves the utilization of human resources, who because of decreasi in the administrative processes, can more effectively deal with the very process of solving certain issues.