State of Practice and Challenges of Issue Management for Component-based and Service-Oriented Systems: An Empirical Study

Modern software systems often consist of independently developed components, e.g., libraries or (micro-)services, that can be combined to form a larger architecture. Many of these components are developed externally, i.e., in other projects by other teams, which is particularly the case in service-oriented architectures. Even though the components are independently developed, bugs may arise that propagate along the call chains, which sometimes negatively affect the calling components. However, as such components are typically managed in separate issue management systems (IMS), identifying that a downstream component is affected by an upstream component’s issues is complex and time-consuming. Even though some scientific works and IMS forums discuss how to manage such cross-component issues, there is no systematic study on the state of practice and the challenges of issue management when different components are affected. Therefore, this study aims to determine which types of components are usually included in modern software projects, how developers identify and manage issue propagation between components, and how often they face such propagations. To get these insights, we conducted an empirical study through a questionnaire with 64 industry experts and open-source contributors and interviewed seven of them. Our key takeaways help researchers and software engineers to understand possible impacts and to improve cross-component issue management. We identified, for example, that related issues currently are non-semantically linked via URLs in issue comments.