Task articulation in software maintenance: Integrating source code annotations with an issue tracking system

Managing and articulating development tasks is an important aspect of software maintenance. Developers already have a variety of specialty tools to support task management, for example, issue tracking and configuration management software, but they also make use of other tools within their software engineering environments to support software task management. An example of one such mechanism is the appropriation of source code comments to document finer grained details of formally specified tasks. In this research, we propose and present a tool that integrates these source code annotations with an issue tracking management system. We describe how this tool addresses deficiencies that occur in task management and propose future research to improve task management.