Research preview: Automatic data categorization in issue tracking systems

Abstract

Issues in an issue tracking system contain different kinds of information like requirements, features, development tasks, bug reports, bug fixing tasks, refactoring tasks and so on. This information is generally accompanied by discussions or comments, which again are different kinds of information (e.g. social interaction, implementation ideas, stack traces or error messages). We propose to improve automatic categorization of this information and use the categorized data to support software engineering tasks. We want to obtain improvements in two different ways. Firstly, we want to obtain algorithmic improvements (e.g. natural language processing techniques) to retrieve and use categorized auxiliary data. Secondly we want to utilize multiple task-based categorizations to support different software engineering tasks.