Predicting re-opened bugs: A case study on the Eclipse project

Emad Shihab, Akinori Ihara, Yasutaka Kamei, Walid M. Ibrahim, Masao Ohira, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan, Ken Ichi Matsumoto

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

81 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Bug fixing accounts for a large amount of the software maintenance resources. Generally, bugs are reported, fixed, verified and closed. However, in some cases bugs have to be re-opened. Re-opened bugs increase maintenance costs, degrade the overall user-perceived quality of the software and lead to unnecessary rework by busy practitioners. In this paper, we study and predict re-opened bugs through a case study on the Eclipse project. We structure our study along 4 dimensions: 1) the work habits dimension (e.g., the weekday on which the bug was initially closed on), 2) the bug report dimension (e.g., the component in which the bug was found) 3) the bug fix dimension (e.g., the amount of time it took to perform the initial fix) and 4) the team dimension (e.g., the experience of the bug fixer). Our case study on the Eclipse Platform 3.0 project shows that the comment and description text, the time it took to fix the bug, and the component the bug was found in are the most important factors in determining whether a bug will be re-opened. Based on these dimensions we create decision trees that predict whether a bug will be re-opened after its closure. Using a combination of our dimensions, we can build explainable prediction models that can achieve 62.9% precision and 84.5% recall when predicting whether a bug will be re-opened.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2010
Pages249-258
Number of pages10
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2010 - Beverly, MA, United States
Duration: Oct 13 2010Oct 16 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings - Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE
ISSN (Print)1095-1350

Other

Other17th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, WCRE 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBeverly, MA
Period10/13/1010/16/10

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software

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