Multi-objective search-based approach to estimate issue resolution time

Background: Resolving issues is central to modern agile software development where a software is developed and evolved incrementally through series of issue resolutions. An issue could represent a requirement for a new functionality, a report of a software bug or a description of a project task. Aims: Knowing how long an issue will be resolved is thus important to different stakeholders including end-users, bug reporters, bug triagers, developers and managers. This paper aims to propose a multi-objective search-based approach to estimate the time required for resolving an issue. Methods: Using genetic programming (a meta-heuristic optimization method), we iteratively generate candidate estimate models and search for the optimal model in estimating issue resolution time. The search is guided simultaneously by two objectives: maximizing the accuracy of the estimation model while minimizing its complexity. Results: Our evaluation on 8,260 issues from five large open source projects demonstrate that our approach significantly (p < 0.001) outperforms both the baselines and state-of-the-art techniques. Conclusions: Evolutionary search-based approaches offer an effective alternative to build estimation models for issue resolution time. Using multiple objectives, one for measuring the accuracy and the other for the complexity, helps produce accurate and simple estimation models.