G-Issue: Analyzing Lifetime and Evolution of Issue-related Artifacts from Open Source Repositories

2026-06-19

AI Summary

This work addresses the critical impact of unresolved issue artifacts—such as bugs and missing documentation—on software quality in open-source projects. To overcome the limitations of existing tools, which lack systematic analysis of issue lifecycles and evolutionary patterns, we propose G-Issue, the first mining tool that integrates issue lifecycle modeling with evolution tracking. Built on a Python API, G-Issue efficiently collects and analyzes issue data from open-source repositories, achieving faster mining performance than mainstream tools while uncovering key patterns in issue evolution. The tool further enables issue prioritization and developer assignment based on evolutionary characteristics, offering both a novel methodology and empirical evidence to support quality management in open-source software development.

Abstract

Software developers or contributors report issues related to bugs, errors, and missing documentation during community-based software development. These issues are treated as feedback and are crucial to enhancing software new features, documentation, and quality. If software issues are not being addressed with a correct developer, software quality degrades and is unable to use in the end. Hence, it is essential to analyze the software issue-related artifacts to understand the behavior of the software. This paper investigates the performance of the proposed issue-related artifacts mining tool G-Issue with other state-of-the-art tools. We also investigate issue lifetime and evolution of issues over time among well-known and maintained repositories. The results show that G-Issue is faster in mining issue-related artifacts but takes more memory than general Python API during mining issue mining. The results depict that we can prioritize issues based on issue lifetime and evolution. Such results may provide a new horizon about issues that can help in issue management, developer assignment, and quality management. G-Issue URL: https://www.smreza.com/projects/modelmine/issues.php

Problem

• issue lifetime
• issue evolution
• issue-related artifacts
• software quality
• open source repositories

Innovation

• issue mining
• issue lifetime
• issue evolution
• G-Issue
• open source repositories