Issue Tracking Systems: What Developers Want and Use

An Issue Tracking System (ITS) allows a developer to keep track of, prioritize, and assign multitudes of bugs, feature requests, and other development tasks such as testing. Despite ITSs play a significant role in day-to-day developers’ activities, no previous study investigated what developers want and use in an ITS. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a feature matrix that maps six of the most used ITS to features, and second, we measure the developers’ level of use and perceived importance of each feature.