An Empirical Analysis of Issue Templates Usage in Large-Scale Projects on GitHub

GitHub Issues is a widely used issue tracking tool in open-source software projects. Originally designed with broad flexibility, its lack of standardization led to incomplete issue reports, impeding software development and maintenance efficiency. To counteract this, GitHub introduced issue templates in 2016, which rapidly became popular. Our study assesses the current use and evolution of these templates in large-scale projects, and their impact on issue tracking metrics, including resolution time, number of reopens, and comments. Employing a comprehensive analysis of 350 templates and their past versions from 100 significant open-source projects, we also evaluated over 1.9 million issues for template conformity and impact. Additionally, we solicited insights from open-source software maintainers through a survey. Our findings highlight issue templates' extensive usage in 99 of the 100 surveyed large-scale projects, with a growing preference for issue forms, a more structured template variant. Projects with a template exhibited markedly reduced resolution time (374.56 days to 103.46 days) and reduced comment count (4.90 to 4.34) compared to those without. Use of issue forms further significantly decreased resolution time, the number of reopenings, and discussion extent. Thus, our research underscores issue templates' positive impact in large-scale projects, offering recommendations for improved effectiveness.