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Modeling Bug Report Quality |
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Abstract: Software developers spend a significant portion of their resources handling user-submitted bug reports. For software that is widely deployed, the number of bug reports typically outstrips the resources available to triage them. As a result, some reports may be dealt with too slowly or not at all. We present a descriptive model of bug report quality based on a statistical analysis of surface features of over 27,000 publicly available bug reports for the Mozilla Firefox project. The model predicts whether a bug report is triaged within a given amount of time. Our analysis of this model has implications for bug reporting systems and suggests features that should be emphasized when composing bug reports. We evaluate our model empirically based on its hypothetical performance as an automatic filter of incoming bug reports. Our results show that our model performs significantly better than chance in terms of precision and recall. In addition, we show that our model can reduce the overall cost of software maintenance in a setting where the average cost of addressing a bug report is more than 2% of the cost of ignoring an important bug report.
Pieter Hooimeijer and Westley Weimer. Modeling Bug Report Quality. In Proceedings of the Conference on Automated software Engineering, pp. 34-43, November 2007.
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