A Longitude Analysis on Bitcoin Issue Repository

As one of the most successful Blockchain systems, Bitcoin evolved over the past 8 years. The collaborative contribution of its online software development community gradually shaped the functionality and performance of Bitcoin. To date, most discussions around Bitcoin are from technologies underlying the product, as well as market applications. There are very few studies on the development and evolution processes of the Bitcoin software. It is important to investigate on such developmental issues, in order to better understand the development methodologies and lessons learnt from such a spearheaded Blockchain system. This paper serves this purpose by examining the issues data extracted from the Bitcoin GitHub repository from 2011 to 2018. It reports the trends of the major development issues from a longitude perspective. The main results include: 1) the average lifespan of an issue in Bitcoin issue repository is approximately 57 days; and 2) the Top-7 issue types including refactoring, tests, doc, RPC.REST.ZMQ, GUI, bugs, and wallet, accounting for 64.3% of all issues; 3) topic modeling techniques are beneficial in mining popularity and evolution of key issue topics and most problematic architecture components. Using data analysis and visualization techniques, this paper suggests the insights for significant development decisions such as better managing issue repository and strategic allocating of bug resolution effort.