Issues Closed

Question: How many issues were closed during a certain period?

Issues are defined as in Issues New. Issues closed are those that changed to state closed during a certain period.

In some cases or some projects, there are other states or tags that could be considered as “closed”. For example, in some projects they use the state or the tag “fixed” for stating that the issue is closed, even when it needs some action for formally closing it.

In most issue trackers, closed issues can be reopened after they are closed. Reopening an issue can be considered as opening a new issue, or making void the previous close (see parameters, below).

For example, in GitHub Issues or GitLab Issues, issues closed are issues that were closed during a certain period.

Objectives

Volume of issues that are dealt with in a project. Closed issues are a proxy for the activity in a project. By counting closed issues related to code in the set of repositories corresponding to a project, you can have an idea of the overall activity in finishing work with issues in that project. Of course, this metric is not the only one that should be used to track volume of coding activity.

Implementation

Aggregators:

• Count. Total number of closed issues during the period.
• Ratio. Ratio of closed issues over total number of issues during that period.
• Reactions. Number of “thumb-ups” or other reactions on issues.

Parameters:

• Period of time. Start and finish date of the period during which issues are considered. Default: forever.

• Criteria for source code. Algorithm. Default: all issues are related to source code. If we focus on source code, we need a criterion for deciding whether an issue is related to the source code or not. All issues could be included in the metric by altering the default.

• Reopen as new. Boolean, defining whether reopened issues are considered as new issues. If false, it means the closing event previous to a reopen event should be considered as void. Note: if this parameter is false, the number of closed issues for any period could change in the future, if some of them are reopened.

• Criteria for closed. Algorithm. Default: having a closing event during the period of interest.

Filters

• By actors (submitter, commenter, closer). Requires merging identities corresponding to the same author.
• By groups of actors (employer, gender… for each of the actors). Requires actor grouping, and likely, actor merging.

Visualizations

• Count per time period over time
• Ratio per time period over time

These could be grouped by applying the filters defined aboce. These could be represented as bar charts, with time running in the X axis.

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