Smells Depend on the Context: An Interview Study of Issue Tracking Problems and Smells in Practice

2026-01-07

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

AI Summary

This study addresses the prevailing assumption in software engineering research that “code smells” identified in issue tracking systems (ITS) are universally problematic, despite limited empirical evidence of their real-world impact. Through semi-structured interviews with 26 experienced software engineers from diverse industries and organizations, complemented by thematic analysis, the authors systematically investigate practical challenges in ITS usage and practitioners’ perceptions of 31 ITS smells documented in the literature. The findings reveal that the relevance and severity of these smells are highly context-dependent—shaped by factors such as team size, workflow stage, and system configuration—and that many proposed smells are neither prevalent nor perceived as issues in practice. The study identifies 14 recurring problem categories (e.g., poor issue discoverability, zombie issues, and process bloat) and proposes context-aware tooling recommendations, thereby challenging the assumption of smell universality.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Computational Complexity of Reasoning
• Application Domains: Software Engineering

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics

Abstract

Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enable software developers and managers to collect and resolve issues collaboratively. While researchers have extensively analysed ITS data to automate or assist specific activities such as issue assignments, duplicate detection, or priority prediction, developer studies on ITSs remain rare. Particularly, little is known about the challenges Software Engineering (SE) teams encounter in ITSs and when certain practices and workarounds (such as leaving issue fields like “priority” empty) are considered problematic. To fill this gap, we conducted an in-depth interview study with 26 experienced SE practitioners from different organisations and industries. We asked them about general problems encountered, as well as the relevance of 31 ITS smells (aka potentially problematic practices) discussed in the literature. By applying Thematic Analysis to the interview notes, we identified 14 common problems including issue findability, zombie issues, workflow bloat, and lack of workflow enforcement. Participants also stated that many of the ITS smells do not occur or are not problematic. Our results suggest that ITS problems and smells are highly dependent on context factors such as ITS configuration, workflow stage, and team size. We also discuss potential tooling solutions to configure, monitor, and visualise ITS smells to cope with these challenges.

Problem

• Issue Tracking Systems
• Software Engineering
• ITS smells
• Developer Challenges
• Context Dependency

Innovation

• issue tracking systems
• ITS smells
• context dependency
• developer interview study
• software engineering practices