RepoTrace: Browser-Assisted Evidence Collection for GitHub Research Datasets
For empirical software engineering researchers manually constructing GitHub datasets, RepoTrace addresses the problem of fragmented provenance and auditability in the current workflow.
RepoTrace is a browser-assisted tool that collects GitHub issue and pull-request evidence into a local SQLite-backed workspace, preserving provenance and linking source evidence with research interpretation. In a validation pass with 20 Matplotlib issues, it captured 22 snapshots, 38 comments, 20 research notes, 98 annotations, and other artifacts, demonstrating support for a complete local evidence-collection workflow.
Empirical software engineering studies frequently build datasets from GitHub issues and pull requests. In many projects, researchers inspect pages in a browser, copy selected fields into spreadsheets, keep side notes in separate documents, and later run scripts to normalize or export the data. This workflow is flexible, but the page evidence, the research codes, and the rationale behind each decision end up spread across tabs and files, which leaves provenance, update tracking, and multi-reviewer labeling hard to audit. RepoTrace is a browser-assisted research tool that collects GitHub issue and pull-request evidence into a local SQLite-backed workspace. It combines a Chrome side-panel extension, an Express backend, and a React dashboard to capture page snapshots, comments, labels, notes, screening and labeling decisions, refresh history, and scoped exports, keeping the source evidence and the research interpretation linked together. A validation pass collected and checked 20 Matplotlib issues across two study projects. The resulting dataset preserves 22 snapshots, 38 comments, 20 research notes, 98 annotations, 20 screening reviews, 20 fix-evidence entries, and 4 simulated unresolved consensus conflicts. The results show that RepoTrace can support a complete local evidence-collection workflow for manually constructed GitHub issue and pull-request datasets.