Is It a New Feature or Simply “Don't Know Yet”?: On Automated Redundant OSS Feature Requests Identification

Open source projects rely on issue tracking systems such as JIRA or online forums to keep track of users' feedback, expectations and requested features. However, since users are not fully aware of existing features, when submitting new feature requests, redundant requests often appear in the new feature list. It is a waste of time and effort for project contributors to manually identify and reject them, especially in complex systems with many features. Our research is aiming to find a suitable solution to identify redundant feature requests in OSS projects. We have conducted a survey on a well-known Open Source community, Hibernate and gathered all of its feature requests up-to-date. Through studying and categorizing the characteristics of these feature requests, we have found that about 37% of the feature requests were rejected and the most common rejection reason was redundancy. Also we have found that it is very expensive to identify and resolve these redundant feature requests. In this paper, we have proposed our solution to automatically identify redundant feature requests through a Feature Tree Model along with a future research agenda.