SkillScope: A Tool to Predict Fine-Grained Skills Needed to Solve Issues on GitHub

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Carter, Benjamin C., Contreras, Jonathan Rivas, Villegas, Carlos A. Llanes, Acharya, Pawan, Utzerath, Jack, Farner, Adonijah O., Jenkins, Hunter, Johnson, Dylan, Penney, Jacob, Steinmacher, Igor, Gerosa, Marco A., Santos, Fabio
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Carter, Benjamin C.
Contreras, Jonathan Rivas
Villegas, Carlos A. Llanes
Acharya, Pawan
Utzerath, Jack
Farner, Adonijah O.
Jenkins, Hunter
Johnson, Dylan
Penney, Jacob
Steinmacher, Igor
Gerosa, Marco A.
Santos, Fabio
author_facet Carter, Benjamin C.
Contreras, Jonathan Rivas
Villegas, Carlos A. Llanes
Acharya, Pawan
Utzerath, Jack
Farner, Adonijah O.
Jenkins, Hunter
Johnson, Dylan
Penney, Jacob
Steinmacher, Igor
Gerosa, Marco A.
Santos, Fabio
contents New contributors often struggle to find tasks that they can tackle when onboarding onto a new Open Source Software (OSS) project. One reason for this difficulty is that issue trackers lack explanations about the knowledge or skills needed to complete a given task successfully. These explanations can be complex and time-consuming to produce. Past research has partially addressed this problem by labeling issues with issue types, issue difficulty level, and issue skills. However, current approaches are limited to a small set of labels and lack in-depth details about their semantics, which may not sufficiently help contributors identify suitable issues. To surmount this limitation, this paper explores large language models (LLMs) and Random Forest (RF) to predict the multilevel skills required to solve the open issues. We introduce a novel tool, SkillScope, which retrieves current issues from Java projects hosted on GitHub and predicts the multilevel programming skills required to resolve these issues. In a case study, we demonstrate that SkillScope could predict 217 multilevel skills for tasks with 91% precision, 88% recall, and 89% F-measure on average. Practitioners can use this tool to better delegate or choose tasks to solve in OSS projects.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15922
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SkillScope: A Tool to Predict Fine-Grained Skills Needed to Solve Issues on GitHub
Carter, Benjamin C.
Contreras, Jonathan Rivas
Villegas, Carlos A. Llanes
Acharya, Pawan
Utzerath, Jack
Farner, Adonijah O.
Jenkins, Hunter
Johnson, Dylan
Penney, Jacob
Steinmacher, Igor
Gerosa, Marco A.
Santos, Fabio
Software Engineering
Machine Learning
New contributors often struggle to find tasks that they can tackle when onboarding onto a new Open Source Software (OSS) project. One reason for this difficulty is that issue trackers lack explanations about the knowledge or skills needed to complete a given task successfully. These explanations can be complex and time-consuming to produce. Past research has partially addressed this problem by labeling issues with issue types, issue difficulty level, and issue skills. However, current approaches are limited to a small set of labels and lack in-depth details about their semantics, which may not sufficiently help contributors identify suitable issues. To surmount this limitation, this paper explores large language models (LLMs) and Random Forest (RF) to predict the multilevel skills required to solve the open issues. We introduce a novel tool, SkillScope, which retrieves current issues from Java projects hosted on GitHub and predicts the multilevel programming skills required to resolve these issues. In a case study, we demonstrate that SkillScope could predict 217 multilevel skills for tasks with 91% precision, 88% recall, and 89% F-measure on average. Practitioners can use this tool to better delegate or choose tasks to solve in OSS projects.
title SkillScope: A Tool to Predict Fine-Grained Skills Needed to Solve Issues on GitHub
topic Software Engineering
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15922