GitHub is the most widely used platform for software maintenance in the open-source community. Developers report issues on GitHub from time to time while facing difficulties. Having labels on those issues can help developers easily address those issues with prior knowledge of labels. However, most of the GitHub repositories do not maintain regular labeling for the issues. The goal of this work is to classify issues in the open-source community using ML \& DNN models. There are thousands of open-source repositories on GitHub. Some of the repositories label their issues properly whereas some of them do not. When issues are pre-labeled, the problem-solving process and the immediate assignment of corresponding personnel are facilitated for the team, thereby expediting the development process. In this work, we conducted an analysis of prominent GitHub open-source repositories. We classified the issues in some common labels which are: API, Documentation, Enhancement, Question, Easy, Help-wanted, Dependency, CI, Waiting for OP's response, Test, Bug, etc. Our study shows that DNN models outperf
The Android ecosystem is profoundly fragmented due to the frequent updates of the Android system and the prevalent customizations by mobile device manufacturers. Previous research primarily focused on identifying and repairing evolution-induced API compatibility issues, with limited consideration of devices-specific compatibility issues (DSC issues). To fill this gap, we conduct an empirical study of 197 DSC issues collected from 94 open-source repositories on GitHub. We introduce a new perspective for comprehending these issues by categorizing them into two principal groups, Functionality Breaks, and OEM Features, based on their manifestations and root causes. The functionality break issues disrupt standard Android system behaviors, lead to crashes or unexpected behaviors on specific devices, and require developers to implement workarounds to preserve the original functionality. The OEM feature issues involve the introduction of device-specific functionalities or features beyond the basic Android system. The different nature of functionality break issues and OEM feature issues lead to unique challenges in addressing them. Common solutions for functionality break issues involve cal
The recent exceptional growth in special issues has led to the largest delegation of editorial power in the history of scientific publishing. Has this power been used responsibly? We provide the first systematic analysis of endogeny, the practice of publishing articles in ones own special issue. While moderate levels of endogeny are common, excessive endogeny constitutes scientific misconduct, as it stems from a clear conflict of interest. We define special issues containing more than 33% endogeny as SI-hacked. We build a dataset of over 100,000 special issues published in 2015-2025 by five leading publishers. The large majority of guest editors engage in endogeny responsibly, if at all. Nonetheless, despite endogeny policies by publishers and indexers, SI-hacking is endemic. All journals heavily relying on special issues host SI-hacking; more than 1,000 hacked SIs are published each year, hosting tens of thousands of endogenous articles. Egregious SI-hacking is rare, editors exceeding endogeny thresholds mostly to the extent that publishers allow them to. This is not good news, as it reflects a widespread normalisation of guest editor conflicts of interests. Fortunately, SI-hackin
With the advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), an increasing number of open-source software projects are using LLMs as their core functional component. Although research and practice on LLMs are capturing considerable interest, no dedicated studies explored the challenges faced by practitioners of LLM open-source projects, the causes of these challenges, and potential solutions. To fill this research gap, we conducted an empirical study to understand the issues that practitioners encounter when developing and using LLM open-source software, the possible causes of these issues, and potential solutions. We collected all closed issues from 15 LLM open-source projects and labelled issues that met our requirements. We then randomly selected 994 issues from the labelled issues as the sample for data extraction and analysis to understand the prevalent issues, their underlying causes, and potential solutions. Our study results show that (1) Model Issue is the most common issue faced by practitioners, (2) Model Problem, Configuration and Connection Problem, and Feature and Method Problem are identified as the most frequent causes of the issues, and (3) Optimize Model is the predomin
LLM-based agent systems are emerging as a new software paradigm and have been widely adopted across diverse domains such as medicine, robotics, and programming. However, maintaining these systems requires substantial effort, as they are inevitably prone to bugs and continually evolve to meet changing external requirements. Therefore, automatically resolving agent issues (i.e., bug reports or feature requests) is a crucial and challenging task. While recent software engineering (SE) agents (e.g., SWE-agent) have shown promise in addressing issues in traditional software systems, it remains unclear how effectively they can resolve real-world issues in agent systems, which differ significantly from traditional software. To fill this gap, we first manually analyze 201 real-world agent issues and identify common categories of agent issues. We then spend 500 person-hours constructing AgentIssue-Bench, a reproducible benchmark comprising 50 agent issue resolution tasks (each with an executable environment and failure-triggering tests). We further evaluate state-of-the-art SE agents on AgentIssue-Bench and reveal their limited effectiveness (i.e., with only 0.67% - 4.67% resolution rates).
Version control systems are integral to software development, with GitHub emerging as a popular online platform due to its comprehensive project management tools, including issue tracking and pull requests. However, GitHub lacks a direct link between issues and commits, making it difficult for developers to understand how specific issues are resolved. Although GitHub's Insights page provides some visualization for repository data, the representation of issues and commits related data in a textual format hampers quick evaluation of issue management. This paper presents a prototype web application that generates visualizations to offer insights into issue timelines and reveals different factors related to issues. It focuses on the lifecycle of issues and depicts vital information to enhance users' understanding of development patterns in their projects. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through case studies involving three open-source GitHub repositories. Furthermore, we conducted a user evaluation to validate the efficacy of our prototype in conveying crucial repository information more efficiently and rapidly.
Although issues of open source software are created to discuss and solve technical problems, conversations can become heated, with discussants getting angry and/or agitated for a variety of reasons, such as poor suggestions or violation of community conventions. To prevent and mitigate discussions from getting heated, tools like GitHub have introduced the ability to lock issue discussions that violate the code of conduct or other community guidelines. Despite some early research on locked issues, there is a lack of understanding of how communities use this feature and of potential threats to validity for researchers relying on a dataset of locked issues as an oracle for heated discussions. To address this gap, we (i) quantitatively analyzed 79 GitHub projects that have at least one issue locked as too heated, and (ii) qualitatively analyzed all issues locked as too heated of the 79 projects, a total of 205 issues comprising 5,511 comments. We found that projects have different behaviors when locking issues: while 54 locked less than 10% of their closed issues, 14 projects locked more than 90% of their closed issues. Additionally, locked issues tend to have a similar number of comme
The emergence of smart cities and sustainable development has become a globally accepted form of urbanization. The epitome of smart city development has become possible due to the latest innovative integration of information and communication technology. Citizens of smart cities can enjoy the benefits of a smart living environment, ubiquitous connectivity, seamless access to services, intelligent decision making through smart governance, and optimized resource management. The widespread acceptance of smart cities has raised data security issues, authentication, unauthorized access, device-level vulnerability, and sustainability. This paper focuses on the wholistic overview and conceptual development of smart city. Initially, the work discusses the smart city idea and fundamentals explored in various pieces of literature. Further various smart city applications, including notable implementations, are put forth to understand the quality of living standards. Finally, the paper depicts a solid understanding of different security and privacy issues, including some crucial future research directions.
Creating large-scale verifiable training datasets for issue-resolving tasks is a critical yet notoriously difficult challenge. Existing methods on automating the Gym environment setup process for real-world issues suffer from low success rates and high overhead. Meanwhile, synthesizing new tasks within existing Gym environments leaves the vast pool of authentic, human-reported problems untapped. To maximize the utilization of existing Gym environments and also the rich data of issue-resolving history on GitHub, we introduce SWE-Mirror, a pipeline that distills a real-world issue's semantic essence, mirrors it into another repository with a configured Gym environment, and re-animates it as a verifiable issue-resolving task. SWE-Mirror reuses existing Gym environments along with the vast pool of issue-resolving history hosted on GitHub to construct a large-scale dataset of mirrored authentic and verifiable tasks. Applying SWE-Mirror to 40 repositories across 4 languages, we have curated a dataset with 60,671 issue-resolving tasks and demonstrated the value of our dataset by training and evaluating coding agents at various scale. Post-training experiments show that models trained with
Context: An increasing demand is observed in various domains to employ Machine Learning (ML) for solving complex problems. ML models are implemented as software components and deployed in Machine Learning Software Systems (MLSSs). Problem: There is a strong need for ensuring the serving quality of MLSSs. False or poor decisions of such systems can lead to malfunction of other systems, significant financial losses, or even threats to human life. The quality assurance of MLSSs is considered a challenging task and currently is a hot research topic. Objective: This paper aims to investigate the characteristics of real quality issues in MLSSs from the viewpoint of practitioners. This empirical study aims to identify a catalog of quality issues in MLSSs. Method: We conduct a set of interviews with practitioners/experts, to gather insights about their experience and practices when dealing with quality issues. We validate the identified quality issues via a survey with ML practitioners. Results: Based on the content of 37 interviews, we identified 18 recurring quality issues and 21 strategies to mitigate them. For each identified issue, we describe the causes and consequences according to
Context: Addressing user requests in the form of bug reports and Github issues represents a crucial task of any successful software project. However, user-submitted issue reports tend to widely differ in their quality, and developers spend a considerable amount of time handling them. Objective: By collecting a dataset of around 6,000 issues of 279 GitHub projects, we observe that developers take significant time (i.e., about five months, on average) before labeling an issue as a wontfix. For this reason, in this paper, we empirically investigate the nature of wontfix issues and methods to facilitate issue management process. Method: We first manually analyze a sample of 667 wontfix issues, extracted from heterogeneous projects, investigating the common reasons behind a "wontfix decision", the main characteristics of wontfix issues and the potential factors that could be connected with the time to close them. Furthermore, we experiment with approaches enabling the prediction of wontfix issues by analyzing the titles and descriptions of reported issues when submitted. Results and conclusion: Our investigation sheds some light on the wontfix issues' characteristics, as well as the pot
The HTML5 <canvas> is widely used to display high quality graphics in web applications. However, the combination of web, GUI, and visual techniques that are required to build <canvas> applications, together with the lack of testing and debugging tools, makes developing such applications very challenging. To help direct future research on testing <canvas> applications, in this paper we present a taxonomy of testable <canvas> issues. First, we extracted 2,403 <canvas>-related issue reports from 123 open-source GitHub projects that use the HTML5 <canvas>. Second, we constructed our taxonomy by manually classifying a random sample of 332 issue reports. Our manual classification identified five broad categories of testable <canvas> issues, such as Visual and Performance issues. We found that Visual issues are the most frequent (35%), while Performance issues are relatively infrequent (5%). We also found that many testable <canvas> issues that present themselves visually on the <canvas> are actually caused by other components of the web application. Our taxonomy of testable <canvas> issues can be used to steer future research in
Software development tasks must be performed successfully to achieve software quality and customer satisfaction. Knowing whether software tasks are likely to fail is essential to ensure the success of software projects. Issue Tracking Systems store information of software tasks (issues) and comments, which can be useful to predict issue success; however; almost no research on this topic exists. This work studies the usefulness of textual descriptions of issues and comments for predicting whether issues will be resolved successfully or not. Issues and comments of 588 software projects were extracted from four popular Issue Tracking Systems. Seven machine learning classifiers were trained on 30k issues and more than 120k comments, and more than 6000 experiments were performed to predict the success of three types of issues: bugs, improvements and new features. The results provided evidence that descriptions of issues and comments are useful for predicting issue success with more than 85% of accuracy and precision, and that the predictions of issue success vary over time. Words related to software development were particularly relevant for predicting issue success. Other communication
Energy efficiency is an important criterion to judge the quality of mobile apps, but one third of our randomly sampled apps suffer from energy issues that can quickly drain battery power. To understand these issues, we conducted an empirical study on 27 well-maintained apps such as Chrome and Firefox, whose issue tracking systems are publicly accessible. Our study revealed that the main root causes of energy issues include unnecessary workload and excessively frequent operations. Surprisingly, these issues are beyond the application of present technology on energy issue detection. We also found that 20.6% of energy issues can only manifest themselves under specific contexts such as poor network performance, but such contexts are again neglected by present technology. Therefore, we proposed a novel testing framework for detecting energy issues in real-world apps. Our framework examines apps with well-designed input sequences and runtime contexts. To identify the root causes mentioned above, we employed a machine learning algorithm to cluster the workloads and further evaluate their necessity. For the issues concealed by the specific contexts, we carefully set up several execution co
Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world, running on more than 70% of mobile devices. This implies a gigantic and very competitive market for Android apps. Being successful in such a market is far from trivial and requires, besides the tackling of a problem or need felt by a vast audience, the development of high-quality apps. As recently showed in the literature, connectivity issues (e.g., mishandling of zero/unreliable Internet connection) can result in bugs and/or crashes, negatively affecting the app's user experience. While these issues have been studied in the literature, there are no techniques able to automatically detect and report them to developers. We present CONAN, a tool able to detect statically 16 types of connectivity issues affecting Android apps. We assessed the ability of CONAN to precisely identify these issues in a set of 44 open source apps, observing an average precision of 80%. Then, we studied the relevance of these issues for developers by (i) conducting interviews with six practitioners working with commercial Android apps, and (ii) submitting 84 issue reports for 27 open source apps. Our results show that several of the identifie
More and more users and developers are using Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) to report issues, including bugs, feature requests, enhancement suggestions, etc. Different information, however, is gathered from users when issues are reported on different ITSs, which presents considerable challenges for issue classification tools to work effectively across the ITSs. Besides, bugs often take higher priority when it comes to classifying the issues, while existing approaches to issue classification seldom focus on distinguishing bugs and the other non-bug issues, leading to suboptimal accuracy in bug identification. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach to automatically identify bug-reporting issues across various ITSs. The approach implements the k-NN algorithm to detect and correct misclassifications in data extracted from the ITSs, and trains an attention-based bi-directional long short-term memory (ABLSTM) network using a dataset of over 1.2 million labelled issues to identify bug reports. Experimental evaluation shows that our approach achieved an F-measure of 85.6\% in distinguishing bugs and other issues, significantly outperforming the other benchmark and state-of
Understanding the practice of refactoring documentation is of paramount importance in academia and industry. Issue tracking systems are used by most software projects enabling developers, quality assurance, managers, and users to submit feature requests and other tasks such as bug fixing and code review. Although recent studies explored how to document refactoring in commit messages, little is known about how developers describe their refactoring needs in issues. In this study, we aim at exploring developer-reported refactoring changes in issues to better understand what developers consider to be problematic in their code and how they handle it. Our approach relies on text mining 45,477 refactoring-related issues and identifying refactoring patterns from a diverse corpus of 77 Java projects by investigating issues associated with 15,833 refactoring operations and developers' explicit refactoring intention. Our results show that (1) developers mostly use move refactoring related terms/phrases to target refactoring-related issues; and (2) developers tend to explicitly mention the improvement of specific quality attributes and focus on duplicate code removal. We envision our findings
AI Agents have rapidly gained prominence in both research and industry as systems that extend large language models with planning, tool use, memory, and goal-directed action. Despite this progress, the development and maintenance of Agent systems present recurring engineering difficulties that are not yet well characterized in developer-facing evidence. To address this gap, this study analyzes developer discussions on Stack Overflow and failure reports from GitHub issue trackers associated with widely used Agent frameworks. For Stack Overflow, an Agent-focused corpus is constructed through tag expansion and filtering, latent themes are derived using LDA-MALLET, and topics are manually validated and labeled. For GitHub, a taxonomy of issue themes is developed to capture deployment-time failures and maintenance burdens. Analysis across both platforms identifies seven Stack Overflow topics (comprising 28 subtopics) and thirteen GitHub issue topics, which are synthesized into five overarching families of major Agent challenges: (1) environment, platforms, and dependency management; (2) retrieval, embeddings, and Agent memory; (3) orchestration and execution control; (4) interaction con
Context: Issue tracking systems are used to track and describe tasks in the development process, e.g., requested feature improvements or reported bugs. However, past research has shown that the reported issue types often do not match the description of the issue. Objective: We want to understand the overall maturity of the state of the art of issue type prediction with the goal to predict if issues are bugs and evaluate if we can improve existing models by incorporating manually specified knowledge about issues. Method: We train different models for the title and description of the issue to account for the difference in structure between these fields, e.g., the length. Moreover, we manually detect issues whose description contains a null pointer exception, as these are strong indicators that issues are bugs. Results: Our approach performs best overall, but not significantly different from an approach from the literature based on the fastText classifier from Facebook AI Research. The small improvements in prediction performance are due to structural information about the issues we used. We found that using information about the content of issues in form of null pointer exceptions is
Software developers or contributors report issues related to bugs, errors, and missing documentation during community-based software development. These issues are treated as feedback and are crucial to enhancing software new features, documentation, and quality. If software issues are not being addressed with a correct developer, software quality degrades and is unable to use in the end. Hence, it is essential to analyze the software issue-related artifacts to understand the behavior of the software. This paper investigates the performance of the proposed issue-related artifacts mining tool G-Issue with other state-of-the-art tools. We also investigate issue lifetime and evolution of issues over time among well-known and maintained repositories. The results show that G-Issue is faster in mining issue-related artifacts but takes more memory than general Python API during mining issue mining. The results depict that we can prioritize issues based on issue lifetime and evolution. Such results may provide a new horizon about issues that can help in issue management, developer assignment, and quality management. G-Issue URL: https://www.smreza.com/projects/modelmine/issues.php