Evaluating visual explanation of bug report assignment recommendations

Abstract

Software development projects typically use an issue tracking system where the project members and users can either report faults or request additional features. Each of these reports needs to be triaged to determine such things as the priority of the report or which developers should be assigned to resolve the report. To assist a triager with report assigning, an assignment recommender has been suggested as a means of improving the process. However, proposed assignment recommenders typically present a list of developer names without an explanation of the rationale. This work presents the results of a small user study to validate our approach to visually explaining bug report assignments.