A comprehensive study of issue labeling in GitHub repositories

The open-source software community has grown in size and importance over the years. As a consequence, the number of project contributors has increased considerably. The capability of open-source project repositories to accommodate issue reports is essential. An issue report encompasses a large set of data that describes the necessary changes a software should handle. As developers need detailed information to reproduce and find them, incomplete information is a severe problem that may influence triage and defect detection leading to delays in project maintenance. Issue trackers commonly use the labeling method to add extra details to issues. Our study investigates the usage, creation, and similarities in the context of the issue life cycle in both maintenance and evolution. In addition, we also analyzed the number of issues in the repository between issues' components and the connection between labels and the issue life cycle. The results indicate a significant correlation between repositories with many issues and the creation of labels, but not all repositories use them. 64.58% of the repositories insert new labels as the project evolves. 73.14% repositories applied on issues with the GitHub standard labels. These numbers show that issue labeling is relevant for project maintenance and evolution, as it provides developers with an easy and convenient way to inform about an incoming issue.