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Main Authors: Zhou, Chunying, Xie, Xiaoyuan, Chen, Gong, He, Peng, Li, Bing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11205
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author Zhou, Chunying
Xie, Xiaoyuan
Chen, Gong
He, Peng
Li, Bing
author_facet Zhou, Chunying
Xie, Xiaoyuan
Chen, Gong
He, Peng
Li, Bing
contents Issue assignment plays a critical role in open-source software (OSS) maintenance, which involves recommending the most suitable developers to address the reported issues. Given the high volume of issue reports in large-scale projects, manually assigning issues is tedious and costly. Previous studies have proposed automated issue assignment approaches that primarily focus on modeling issue report textual information, developers' expertise, or interactions between issues and developers based on historical issue-fixing records. However, these approaches often suffer from performance limitations due to the presence of incorrect and missing labels in OSS datasets, as well as the long tail of developer contributions and the changes of developer activity as the project evolves. To address these challenges, we propose IssueCourier, a novel Multi-Relational Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network approach for issue assignment. Specifically, we formalize five key relationships among issues, developers, and source code files to construct a heterogeneous graph. Then, we further adopt a temporal slicing technique that partitions the graph into a sequence of time-based subgraphs to learn stage-specific patterns. Furthermore, we provide a benchmark dataset with relabeled ground truth to address the problem of incorrect and missing labels in existing OSS datasets. Finally, to evaluate the performance of IssueCourier, we conduct extensive experiments on our benchmark dataset. The results show that IssueCourier can improve over the best baseline up to 45.49% in top-1 and 31.97% in MRR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_11205
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle IssueCourier: Multi-Relational Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network for Open-Source Issue Assignment
Zhou, Chunying
Xie, Xiaoyuan
Chen, Gong
He, Peng
Li, Bing
Software Engineering
Issue assignment plays a critical role in open-source software (OSS) maintenance, which involves recommending the most suitable developers to address the reported issues. Given the high volume of issue reports in large-scale projects, manually assigning issues is tedious and costly. Previous studies have proposed automated issue assignment approaches that primarily focus on modeling issue report textual information, developers' expertise, or interactions between issues and developers based on historical issue-fixing records. However, these approaches often suffer from performance limitations due to the presence of incorrect and missing labels in OSS datasets, as well as the long tail of developer contributions and the changes of developer activity as the project evolves. To address these challenges, we propose IssueCourier, a novel Multi-Relational Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network approach for issue assignment. Specifically, we formalize five key relationships among issues, developers, and source code files to construct a heterogeneous graph. Then, we further adopt a temporal slicing technique that partitions the graph into a sequence of time-based subgraphs to learn stage-specific patterns. Furthermore, we provide a benchmark dataset with relabeled ground truth to address the problem of incorrect and missing labels in existing OSS datasets. Finally, to evaluate the performance of IssueCourier, we conduct extensive experiments on our benchmark dataset. The results show that IssueCourier can improve over the best baseline up to 45.49% in top-1 and 31.97% in MRR.
title IssueCourier: Multi-Relational Heterogeneous Temporal Graph Neural Network for Open-Source Issue Assignment
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.11205