Smells Depend on the Context: An Interview Study of Issue Tracking Problems and Smells in Practice

TL;DR

The paper investigates how issue tracking system smells surface in practice through 26 interviews across 19 organizations, revealing 14 common problems organized into workflow, information, and organizational categories, and 31 smells spanning issue properties, linking, and development processes. Using thematic analysis and closed coding, the study demonstrates that smell prevalence and severity are strongly context-dependent, challenging one-size-fits-all automated solutions. It offers practitioner-grounded insights into configuring, deploying, and evaluating smell-management tooling, including preferences for prevention over detection and integrated, transparent workflows. The findings highlight practical implications for researchers and tool vendors to design context-aware ITS supports that adapt to team roles, workflow stages, and organizational structures. Overall, the work motivates future studies to quantify context effects, validate smell handling across varied environments, and develop customizable tooling that balances automation with flexibility.

Abstract

Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) enable software developers and managers to collect and resolve issues collaboratively. While researchers have extensively analysed ITS data to automate or assist specific activities such as issue assignments, duplicate detection, or priority prediction, developer studies on ITSs remain rare. Particularly, little is known about the challenges Software Engineering (SE) teams encounter in ITSs and when certain practices and workarounds (such as leaving issue fields like "priority" empty) are considered problematic. To fill this gap, we conducted an in-depth interview study with 26 experienced SE practitioners from different organisations and industries. We asked them about general problems encountered, as well as the relevance of 31 ITS smells (aka potentially problematic practices) discussed in the literature. By applying Thematic Analysis to the interview notes, we identified 14 common problems including issue findability, zombie issues, workflow bloat, and lack of workflow enforcement. Participants also stated that many of the ITS smells do not occur or are not problematic. Our results suggest that ITS problems and smells are highly dependent on context factors such as ITS configuration, workflow stage, and team size. We also discuss potential tooling solutions to configure, monitor, and visualise ITS smells to cope with these challenges.