Software Engineering Artifact in Software Development Process - Linkage Between Issues and Code Review Processes

Researchers working with software repositories, often when building performance or quality models, need to recover traceability links between bug reports in issue tracking repositories and reviews in code review systems.

However, too often the information stored in bug tracking repositories is not explicitly tagged or linked to the issues reviewing them. Researchers have to resort to heuristics to tag the data (for example, to identify if an issue is a bug report or a work item).

In this study we promote a research artifact in software engineering, a reusable unit of research that can be used to support other research endeavors and has acted as a support material that enabled the creation of the results published in a great number of papers until now: linking bugs and issues of the code review software process.

We present two state-of-the-practice algorithms on how to link bugs and issues, picking as case study
the open source cloud computing project, OpenStack. OpenStack enforces strict development guidelines and rules on the quality of the data in its issue tracking repository. We empirically compare the outcome of the two approaches, highlighting the most prominent one.