Impact of Triage: A Study of Mozilla and Gnome

Triage is of great interest in software projects because it has the potential to reduce developer effort by involving a broader base of non-developer contributors to filter and augment reported issues. Using issue tracking data and interviews with experienced contributors we investigate ways to quantify the impact of triagers on reducing the number of issues developers need to resolve in two OSS projects: Mozilla and Gnome. We find the primary impact of triagers to involve issue filtering, filling missing information, and determining the relevant product. While triagers were good at filtering invalid issues and as accurate as developers in filling in missing issue attributes, they had more difficulty accurately pinpointing the relevant product. We expect that this work will highlight the importance of issue triage in software projects and will help design further studies on understanding and improving triage practices.