The role of surprisal in issue trackers

James Caddy, Christoph Treude, Markus Wagner, Earl T. Barr

Abstract: Software development creates and relies on a large volume of information, yet the volume of this information can make it challenging for developers to maintain an overview of all goings-on that a team and external actors contribute to a project. We posit that unexpected or “surprising” events could serve as important signposts amidst this information overload. These unexpected events may indicate underlying anomalies or emergent situations that require immediate attention. To explore this premise, our study leverages the concept of ‘surprisal’ from information theory to identify and quantify these unusual occurrences from the issues and pull requests of popular open-source software repositories.

External IDs:dblp:journals/ese/CaddyTWB25