Towards improving bug tracking systems with game mechanisms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Low bug report quality and human conflicts pose challenges to keep bug tracking systems productive. This work proposes to address these issues by applying game mechanisms to bug tracking systems. We investigate the use of game mechanisms in Stack Overflow, an online community organized to resolve computer programming related problems, for which the improvements we seek for bug tracking systems also turn out to be relevant. The results of our Stack Overflow investigation show that its game mechanisms could be used to address these issues by motivating contributors to increase contribution frequency and quality, by filtering useful contributions, and by creating an agile and dependable moderation system. We proceed by mapping these mechanisms to open-source bug tracking systems, and find that most benefits are applicable. Additionally, our results motivate tailoring a reward and reputation system and summarizing bug reports as future directions for increasing the benefits of game mechanisms in bug tracking systems.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.034 | 0.151 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".