Aide-mémoire: Improving a Project’s Collective Memory via Pull Request–Issue Links

Profir-Petru Pârțachi, David Robert White, Earl T. Barr

Abstract:

Links between pull-requests and the issues they address document and accelerate the development of a software project, but
are often omitted. We present a new tool, Aide-mémoire, to suggest such links when a developer submits a pull-request or
closes an issue, smoothly integrating into existing worklows. In contrast to previous state of the art approaches that repair
related commit histories, Aide-mémoire is designed for continuous, real-time and long-term use, employing Mondrian Forests
to adapt over a project’s lifetime and continuously improve traceability. Aide-mémoire is tailored for two speciic instances of
the general traceability problem — namely, commit to issue and pull-request (PR) to issue links, with a focus on the latter —
and exploits data inherent to these two problems to outperform tools for general purpose link recovery. Our approach is
online, language-agnostic, and scalable. We evaluate over a corpus of 213 projects and six programming languages, achieving
a mean average precision of 0.95. Adopting Aide-mémoire is both eicient and efective: a programmer need only evaluate a
single suggested link 94% of the time, and 16% of all discovered links were originally missed by developers.