How Software Developers Use Work Breakdown Relationships in Issue Repositories

Software developers use issues as a means to describe a range
of activities to be undertaken on a software system, including
features to be added and defects that require fixing. When
creating issues, software developers expend manual effort
to specify relationships between issues, such as one issue
blocking another or one issue being a sub-task of another.
In particular, developers use a variety of relationships to express
how work is to be broken down on a project. To better
understand how software developers use work breakdown relationships
between issues, we manually coded a sample of
work breakdown relationships from three open source systems.
We report on our findings and describe how the recognition
of work breakdown relationships opens up new ways
to improve software development techniques.