Samekana: A Browser Extension for Including Relevant Web Links in Issue Tracking System Discussion Forum

Several widely used Issue tracking systems (such as Google Issue Tracker and Bugzilla) contains an integrated threaded discussion forum to facilitate discussion between the development and maintenance team (bug reporters, bug triagers, bug fixers and quality assurance managers). We observe that several comments (and even bug report descriptions) posted to issue tracing system contains links to external websites as references to knowledge sources relevant to the discussion. We conduct a survey (and present the results of the survey) of Google Chromium Developers on the importance and usefulness of web references in issue tracking system comments and the need of a web-browser extension which facilitates easy organization and inclusion of web-links in the post. We conduct a characterization study on an experimental dataset from Google Chromium Issue Tracking system and present results on the distribution of number of links in the dataset, categorization of links into pre-defined classes (such as blogs, community based Q&A websites, developer discussion forums, version control system), correlation of number and types of links with various bug report types (such as security, crash, regression and clean-up) and relation between presence of links and bug resolution time. Survey results and data characterization study motivate the need of building a developer productivity tool to facilitate web-link (as references) organization and inclusion in issue tracking system comments. We present a Google Chromium Web Browser Extension called as Samekana and publish the extension on Google Chromium Web Store which can be freely downloaded by users worldwide. The extension contains features such as annotating (using tags, title and description) and saving web references pertaining to multiple bug reports and tasks and then posting it as bibliography (for easy citation and reference) in issue tracking system comments.