Paper Info
Title
An Empirical Study on Factors Impacting Bug Fixing Time
Abstract
Fixing bugs is an important activity of the software development process. A typical process of bug fixing consists of the following steps: 1) a user files a bug report, 2) the bug is assigned to a developer, 3) the developer fixes the bug, 4) changed code is reviewed and verified, and 5) the bug is resolved. Many studies have investigated the process of bug fixing. However, to the best of our knowledge, none has explicitly analyzed the interval between bug assignment and the time when bug fixing starts. After a bug assignment, some developers will immediately start fixing the bug while others will start bug fixing after a long period. We are blind on developer's delays when fixing bugs. This paper explores such delays of developers through an empirical study on three open source software systems. We examine factors affecting bug fixing time along three dimensions: bug reports, source code involved in the fix, and code changes that are required to fix the bug. We further compare different factors by descriptive logistic regression models. Our results can help development teams better understand factors behind delays, and then improve bug fixing process.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1109/WCRE.2012.32
WCRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
public domain software,code verification,bug report,mylyn,bug fixing process,developer fix,regression analysis,fixing time,typical process,code review,program debugging,code change,bug resolution,development team,change request,open source software system,software development process,changed code,descriptive logistic regression model,empirical software engineering,bug fixing time,bug assignment,source code,empirical study,bug fixing,software engineering,factors impacting bug,history,computer bugs,logistics,operating systems
Software engineering,Computer science,Source code,Change request,Software bug,Theoretical computer science,Software development process,Empirical process (process control model),Open source software,Empirical research,Operating system,Software regression
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1095-1350
978-1-4673-4536-1
26
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.91
15
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Feng Zhang1263.27
Foutse Khomh2137685.40
Ying Zou322418.57
Ahmed E. Hassan45959287.68