no description available

Reshmi Maulik

Meghnad Saha Institute of Technology

India

Subhajit Datta

Yale-NUS College and School of Computing, Singapore

Singapore

Subhashis Majumder

Heritage Institute of Technology

India

Most issue tracking systems for open source software (OSS) development include features for community members to embed visual contents, such as images and videos, to enhance the discussion. Although playing an important role, there is little knowledge on the characteristics of the visual contents to support their use. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical study on the Jupyter Notebook project. We found that more than a quarter of the issues in the Jupyter Notebook project included visual contents. Additionally, issues that had visual contents in the comments but not in the issue posts tended to have a longer discussion and to involve a larger number of discussants. In our qualitative analysis, we identified eight types of visual contents in our sample, with about 60% including screenshots or mockups of the main product. We also found that visual contents served diverse purposes, touching both problem and solution spaces of the issues. Our effort serves as an important step towards a comprehensive understanding of the characteristics of visual contents in OSS issue discussions. Our results provided several design implications for issue tracking systems to better facilitate the use of visual contents.

Vishakha Agrawal

Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering

India

Yong-Han Lin

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

Taiwan

Jinghui Cheng

Polytechnique Montreal

Canada

no description available

Richardson Alexandre

ETS Montreal, University of Quebec

Canada

Ali Ouni

ETS Montreal, University of Quebec

Canada

Mohamed Aymen saied

Laval University

Canada

Salah Bouktif

United Arab Emirates University

United Arab Emirates

Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Rochester Institute of Technology

United States