How are issue reports discussed in Gitter chat rooms?

• Author(s) / Creator(s)

  • Sahar, H.
  • Hindle, Abram
  • Bezemer, C.P.

• Informal communication channels like mailing lists, IRC and instant messaging play a vital role in open source software development by facilitating communication within geographically diverse project teams e.g., to discuss issue reports to facilitate the bug-fixing process. More recently, chat systems like Slack and Gitter have gained a lot of popularity and developers are rapidly adopting them. Gitter is a chat system that is specifically designed to address the needs of GitHub users. Gitter hosts project-based asynchronous chats which foster frequent project discussions among participants. Developer discussions contain a wealth of information such as the rationale behind decisions made during the evolution of a project. In this study, we explore 24 open source project chat rooms that are hosted on Gitter, containing a total of 3,133,106 messages and 14,096 issue references. We manually analyze the contents of chat room discussions around 457 issue reports. The results of our study show the prevalence of issue discussions on Gitter, and that the discussed issue reports have a longer resolution time than the issue reports that are never brought on Gitter.

• Date created

  2020

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Developer discussions
  • Gitter
  • Issue reports

• Type of Item

  Article (Published)

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-m2fn-ky41

• License

  Attribution 4.0 International