Issue Starvation in Software Development: A Case Study on the Redmine Issue Tracking System Dataset

Abstract

In computing, starvation refers to the scenario when a process does not get required resources to complete its work. This mainly happens due to very simple priority based scheduling algorithms. Issues in software development require resources too and which issue will get the required resources depend on its priority. So the question is: Does starvation occur in Software Development too? The authors tried to answer the question with the help of their prepared dataset named as “Redmine Dataset”. Redmine is one of the popular web-based project management tool as well as an Issue Tracking Systems which also provide role-based access control. Currently, the Redmine ITS has more than 13000 issues and the number of issues is increasing time to time being. The authors have analyzed the Redmine dataset and found that starvation also occurred for issues in Software Development. The authors believe that this finding will steer the Software Engineering community for conducting research on advanced prioritization techniques which will resolve Issue starvation. Furthermore, the authors have provided few future research directions where this dataset can be used.