Using PageRank to Reveal Relevant Issues to Support Decision-Making on Open Source Projects

Software release planning is crucial to software projects that adopt incremental development. Open source projects depend on their globally distributed maintainers’ communities who share project information, usually described in the software project repository as issues, to plan the contents and timing of the next releases. This paper introduces an approach based on software issues to support decision-making regarding open source software development activities such as release planning and retrospectives. It uses the PageRank algorithm to suggest an importance ranking of the software issues based on the issues dependencies topology. When based on a highly connected topology, project leaders can use this rank as an input to planning activities. The observation of two open source projects indicates the feasibility of our approach.