Lars Grammel, Holger Schackmann, Adrian Schröter, Christoph Treude, Margaret-Anne D. Storey. Attracting the Community’s Many Eyes: an Exploration of User Involvement in Issue Tracking. 2010.
A community of users who report bugs and request features provides valuable feedback that can be used in product development. Many open source projects provide publicly accessible issue trackers to facilitate such feedback. We compare the community involvement in issue tracker usage between the open source project Eclipse and the closed source project IBM Jazz to evaluate if publicly accessible issue trackers work as well in closed source projects. We find that IBM Jazz successfully receives user feedback through this channel. We then explore the differences in work item processing in IBM Jazz between team members, project members and externals. We conclude that making public issue trackers available in closed source projects is a useful approach for eliciting feedback from the community, but that work items created by team members are processed differently from work items created by project members and externals.