ColMiner: a tool to support communications management in an issue tracking environment

Communication is one of the pillars of collaborative work and has been addressed in the literature as one of the critical factors that impact the results of a software project. However, there is a lack of computational tools to support communication analysis. This paper introduces ColMiner, a tool capable to measure the communication quality in an issue tracking environment through the calculation of the issue comments relevance for the main theme of the discussion (thematic relevance). Its purpose is to identify failures in the communication process. The approach of communication analysis uses some text mining techniques based on the use of graphs to represent the comments textual content. To validate the approach, the relevances calculated by ColMiner are compared with those manually defined by some developers. Finally, the work presents the main funcionalities of ColMiner, highlighting the support to the communications management in software projects, and discuss some threats to validity.