GFI-Bot: Automated Good First Issue Recommendation on GitHub

Published: November 14, 2022

Authors: Hao He, Haonan Su, Wenxin Xiao, Runzhi He, and Minghui Zhou
Venue: The 2022 ACM 30th Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
Links: [DOI] [BibTeX] [PDF] [Code]

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Abstract

To facilitate newcomer onboarding, GitHub recommends the use of "good first issue" (GFI) labels to signal issues suitable for newcomers to resolve. However, previous research shows that manually labeled GFIs are scarce and inappropriate, calling the need for automated recommendations. In this paper, we present GFI-Bot (accessible at https://gfibot.io), a proof-of-concept machine learning powered bot for automated GFI recommendation in practice. Project maintainers can configure GFI-Bot to discover and label possible GFIs so that newcomers can easily locate issues for making their first contributions. GFI-Bot also provides a high-quality, up-to-date dataset for advancing GFI recommendation research.