Poster: Use of Trace Link Types in Issue Tracking Systems

Issue tracking systems (ITS) are widely used to describe and manage activities in software systems. Within the ITS, software developers create issues and establish typed links among these artifacts. A variety of different link types exists, e. g. that one issue clones another. The rational about choosing a specific link type is not always obvious. In this paper, we study link type selection and focus on the relationship of textual properties of connected issues to picked link type. We performed a study on seven open-source systems and quantified the usage of typed links. Further, we report preliminary results indicating, that depending on link type, a link mostly captures textual similarity of issues and thus may provide only limited additional information.