jQAssistant GitHub-Issues Plugin

This is a GitHub issue scanner for jQAssistant. It enables jQAssistant to scan and analyze GitHub issues.

Getting Started

Download the jQAssistant command line tool for your system: jQAssistant - Get Started.

Next download the latest version from the release tab. Put the jqa-githubissues-plugin-*.jar into the plugins folder of the jQAssistant commandline tool.

Create a file named githubissues.xml. The plugin can scan multiple repositories owned by different users. Please note that the GitHub REST-API requires login credentials to access any of its functions. Therefore, login credentials must be provided per repository.

<github-issues-configuration>
    <github-repository>
        <user>github-user</user>
        <name>github-repository-name</name>

        <credentials>
            <user>authentication-user</user>
            <password>authentication-password</password>
        </credentials>
    </github-repository>

    <github-repository>
        ...
    </github-repository>
</github-issues-configuration>

Now scan your configuration and wait for the plugin to finish:

jqassistant.sh scan -f githubissues.xml

You can then start a local Neo4j server to start querying the database at http://localhost:7474:

jqassistant.sh server

Labels

The GitHub-Issues plugin uses the following labels in the resulting graph:

Label	Description	ID
GitHub-Issues-Configuration-File	A configuration file for the plugin.	-
GitHub	Parent label for all nodes related to the GitHub-Issues plugin.	-
Repository	Represents a GitHub Repository.	"repo-user/repo-name"
Issue	Represents a GitHub Issue.	"repo-user/repo-name#issue-number"
Milestone	Represents a GitHub Milestone which is a collection of Issues.	"repo-user/repo-name#milestone-id"
Comment	Represents a Comment under a GitHub Issue.	-
PullRequest	Every PullRequest is an Issue, but not every Issue is a PullRequest.	"repo-user/repo-name#issue-number"
User	Represents a GitHub User.	"user-name"
Commit	Represents a GitHub Commit.	"repo-user/repo-name#commit-sha"

Here are the possible relations between those labels:

(GitHub-Issues-Configuration-File)  -[:SPECIFIES_REPOSITORY]    ->  (Repository)

(Repository)    -[:HAS_ISSUE]         ->    (Issue)
(Repository)    -[:HAS_MILESTONE]     ->    (Milestone)

(Issue)         -[:HAS_LABEL]         ->    (Label)
(Issue)         -[:HAS_COMMENT]       ->    (Comment)
(Issue)         -[:HAS_ASSIGNEE]      ->    (User)
(Issue)         -[:CREATED_BY]        ->    (User)
(Issue)         -[:IS_PART_OF]        ->    (Milestone)

(PullRequest)   -[:HAS_LAST_COMMIT]   ->    (Commit)

(Milestone)     -[:CREATED_BY]        ->    (User)

(Comment)       -[:FOLLOWED_BY]       ->    (Comment)
(Comment)       -[:CREATED_BY]        ->    (User)

(Issue|Comment) -[:REFERENCES_ISSUE]  ->    (Issue)
(Issue|Comment) -[:REFERENCES_COMMIT] ->    (Commit)
(Issue|Comment) -[:REFERENCES_USER]   ->    (User)

Use Cases

Overview

List all your open Issues over multiple repositories:

MATCH
    (r:Repository)-[:HAS_ISSUE]->(i:Issue {state:"open"})
RETURN
    r.repositoryId, i.title, i.body

Count open Issues per repository:

MATCH
    (r:Repository)-[:HAS_ISSUE]->(Issue {state:"open"})
RETURN
    r.repositoryId, count(*) AS issueCount
ORDER BY
    issueCount DESC

List open issues per user:

MATCH
    (Issue {state:"open"})-[:HAS_ASSIGNEE]->(u:User)
RETURN
    u.login, count(*)

Issue quality

Show issues without description:

MATCH
    (i:Issue)
WHERE
    i.body = ""
RETURN
    i.issueId, i.title

Show issues without labels:

MATCH 
    (i:Issue)
WHERE 
    NOT (i:Issue)-[:HAS_LABEL]->()
RETURN
    i.title, i.issueId

Show issues ordered descending by the amount of comments:

MATCH 
    path=((i:Issue)-[:HAS_COMMENT]->()-[:FOLLOWED_BY*]->())
RETURN
    i.title, i.issueId, length(path) AS pathLength, i.state
ORDER BY
    pathLength DESC, i.state DESC

Show durations it needed to resolve an issue:

WITH
    issue, duration.inDays(date(issue.createdAt), date(issue.updatedAt)).days AS duration
RETURN 
    issue.issueId, issue.title, duration + " days" AS timToSolve
ORDER BY
    duration DESC

Show issues older than 1 month that are still open:

MATCH
    (issue:Issue {state:"open"})
WHERE
    date(issue.createdAt) <= date('20180713')
RETURN 
    *

Why are these issues still open?

Let's have a look at a few indicators:

• Do these Issues have labels?

MATCH
    (issue:Issue {state:"open"})
WHERE
    date(issue.createdAt) <= date('20180713') AND NOT (issue:Issue)-[:HAS_LABEL]->()
RETURN 
    *

→ If not, then probably no one looked at these issues.

• Is anyone assigned to this issue?

MATCH
    (issue:Issue {state:"open"})
WHERE
    date(issue.createdAt) <= date('20180713') AND NOT (issue:Issue)-[:HAS_ASSIGNEE]->(:User)
RETURN 
    issue

→ If not, then probably no one feels responsible for this issue.

Known Problems

Performance

The performance of the plugin is limited by the GitHub REST API. We are not allowed to make more than one request per second. See this for more information. For each Issue and every Comment the body text gets parsed to HTML by this endpoint. We need to do this to resolve references to User, Commits and Commits in the markdown texts.

That is why a analysis of ~1800 issues can take a few hours.

Only one configuration file

At the moment only one configuration file is supported. When you scan more than one at a time nodes representing the same real world entity won't be identified. Furthermore, the plugin doesn't print a warning so be careful to avoid wrong analyses of your repositories!

Did you find a bug?

Please have a look at the issue section in GitHub. If you can't find your bug open a ticket with an reproducible example and your error logs.

Contribution

If you want to contribute here are a few tips to get you started:

Build the GitHub-Issues plugin:

cd plugin

# Build a fat-JAR
mvn clean package

# Copy the resulting JAR into the jQAssistant CLI plugins folder
cp target/jqa-githubissues-plugin-0.1-jar-with-dependencies.jar ../run/jqassistant-commandline-neo4jv3-1.4.0/plugins/

Run code coverage via Corbertura:

mvn cobertura:cobertura

The coverage reports can be found under target/site/cobertura.