Leveraging the Power of Images: Image Recommendation to Enhance Issue Reports

The trend of sharing images and image-based social networks has eventually changed the landscape of social networks. As a result, this shift has impacted social coding platforms, and previous studies showed that image sharing has become increasingly popular among software developers. However, most developers’ productivity assistance tools predominantly rely on textual content only. To enhance issue reports, this study focuses on three primary objectives: (i) identifying issue reports that benefit from image sharing and processing in Bugzilla, (ii) identifying the type of image that would improve the bug report, and (iii) conducting a comprehensive qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the tool’s performance and impact. The quantitative evaluation demonstrates that our tool achieves an average recall of 78% and an average F1-score of 74% in predicting the necessity of including image attachments in issue reports. Moreover, our qualitative evaluation of software developers showed that 75% of the developers found the overall design and recommendations of our method practically useful for issue reporting. This study, along with its associated dataset and methodology, represents the first research on recommending images to developers for enhanced issue report communication. Our results illuminate a promising trajectory for enhanced and visual productivity tools for developers.