Paper Info
Title
An Entropy Evaluation Approach for Triaging Field Crashes: A Case Study of Mozilla Firefox
Abstract
A crash is an unexpected termination of an application during normal execution. Crash reports record stack traces and run-time information once a crash occurs. A group of similar crash reports represents a crash-type. The triaging of crash-types is critical to shorten the development and maintenance process. Crash triaging process decides the priority of crash-types to be fixed. The decision typically depends on many factors, such as the impact of the crash-type, (i.e, its severity), the frequency of occurring, and the effort required to implement a fix for the crash-type. In this paper, we propose the use of entropy region graphs to triage crash-types. An entropy region graph captures the distribution of the occurrences of crash-types among the users of a system. We conduct an empirical study on crash reports and bugs, collected from 10 beta releases of Fire fox 4. We show that our proposed triaging technique enables a better classification of crash-types than the current triaging used by Fire fox teams. Developers and managers could use such a technique to prioritize crash-types during triage, to estimate developer workloads, and to decide which crash-types patches should be included in a next release.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1109/WCRE.2011.39
WCRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Internet,entropy,online front-ends,program testing,Mozilla Firefox,crash triaging process,crash-type patch,entropy evaluation,entropy region graphs,triaging field crash,unexpected termination,Crash,bug,entropy region graphs,triaging
Graph,Crash,Computer security,Computer science,Software bug,Server,Operations research,Theoretical computer science,Triage,Frequency conversion,Empirical research,The Internet
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
21
1.11
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Foutse Khomh1137685.40
Brian Chan2604.08
Ying Zou322418.57
Ahmed E. Hassan45959287.68