Visualizing GitHub Issues

The rise of distributed version control systems, such as git, and platforms built on top of it, such as GitHub, has triggered a change in how software is developed. Most notably, state-of-the-art practice foresees the use of pull requests and issues, enriched by means to enable discussions among the involved people. Platforms like GitHub and GitLab have thus turned into comprehensive and cohesive modern software development environments, also offering additional mechanisms, such as code review tools and a transversal support for continuous integration and deployment. However, the plethora of concepts, mechanisms, and their interconnections are stored and presented in textual form, which makes the understanding of the underlying evolutionary processes difficult.We introduce the notion of an issue tale, a visual narrative of the events and actors revolving around any GitHub issue, and present an approach, implemented as an interactive visual analytics tool, to depict and analyze the relevant information pertaining to issue tales. We illustrate our approach and its implementation on several open-source software systems.