The significance of bug report elements
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The significance of bug report elements Mozhan Soltani1
¨ 1 · Felienne Hermans1 · Thomas Back
Published online: 14 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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 ∼70%, ∼76%, ∼55%, and ∼33% of the projects. However, on avarage, over 70% of bug reports lack these elements. Keywords Software debugging · Mining repositories · Empirical software engineering
1 Introduction Open source software projects often maintain issue repositories to manage feature requests and bug reports. There are potential advantages to using open issue repositories (Anvik et al. 2005). Contributors of software projects provide their inputs and maintain focused conversations over them. As a result, more bugs in software projects may be identified and fixed (Anvik et al. 2005). Communicated by: Federica Sarro Mozhan Soltani
[email protected] Felienne Hermans [email protected] Thomas B¨ack [email protected] 1
Leiden University, Leiden, Netherlands
5256
Empirical Software Engineering (2020) 25:5255–5294
Bug reports contain various types of information, including: software version, crash description, reproducing steps, reproducing test cases, crash stack traces, and fix suggestions. To make bug reports consistent, often default templates are provided in project repositories, where certain required or at least recommended fields are specified to be filled by the contributors. Yet, the content and therefore quality of bug reports vary (Zimmermann et al. 2010). Potential reasons for this issue include: data loss during a software crash, difficulty to find crash data in log files, and lack of sufficient technical experience (Zimmermann et al. 2010). If too little data is provided in bug reports, then understanding the problem, and therefore reproducing it is nontrivial and time-consuming. On the other hand, reproducing software crashes is a vital step in software debugging. Developers need to know how t
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