How Software Developers Use Work Breakdown Relationships in Issue Repositories

Software developers use issues as a means to describe a range of activities to be undertaken on a software system, including features to be added and defects that require fixing. When creating issues, software developers expend manual effort to specify relationships between issues, such as one issue blocking another or one issue being a sub-task of another. In particular, developers use a variety of relationships to express how work is to be broken down on a project. To better understand how software developers use work breakdown relationships between issues, we manually coded a sample of work breakdown relationships from three open source systems. We report on our findings and describe how the recognition of work breakdown relationships opens up new ways to improve software development techniques.