Paper Info
Title
The Significance Of Bug Report Elements
Abstract
Open source software projects often use issue repositories, where project contributors submit bug reports. Using these repositories, more bugs in software projects may be identified and fixed. However, the content and therefore quality of bug reports vary. In this study, we aim to understand the significance of different elements in bug reports. We interviewed 35 developers to gain insights into their perceptions on the importance of various contents in bug reports. To assess our findings, we surveyed 305 developers. The results show developers find it highly important that bug reports include crash description, reproducing steps or test cases, and stack traces. Software version, fix suggestions, code snippets, and attached contents have lower importance for software debugging. Furthermore, to evaluate the quality of currently available bug reports, we mined issue repositories of 250 most popular projects on Github. Statistical analysis on the mined issues shows that crash reproducing steps, stack traces, fix suggestions, and user contents, have statistically significant impact on bug resolution times, for similar to 70%, similar to 76%, similar to 55%, and similar to 33% of the projects. However, on avarage, over 70% of bug reports lack these elements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/s10664-020-09882-z
EMPIRICAL SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Software debugging, Mining repositories, Empirical software engineering
Journal
25
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
6
1382-3256
3
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Mozhan Soltani130.37
Felienne Hermans266.49
Thomas Bäck362986.94