application of the proposed model. Finally Section 5
section outlines the conclusions and future work.
2 RELATED WORK
The literature reports different studies addressing
topics related to the quality of a bug report, but in
few cases propose approaches methods for the
evaluation of the bug report quality.
Breu et al., have identified the information that
developers consider necessary within a bug report
(Breu et al., 2010) and suggest, on the basis of the
investigations carried out, improvements to the bug
tracking systems.
Another work describes an adaptive model for
the life cycle of a bug report identifying in the time
to resolution a good measure of its quality
(Hooimeijer and Weimer, 2007). The authors
highlight how writing a good bug report is
complicated, and have to deal with poorly written
report increases the resolution time. Knowing how
the quality of an Issue impacts the overall lifecycle
encourages users to submit better reports
(Hooimeijer and Weimer, 2007).
Aranda and Venoila (Aranda and Venolia, 2009)
examined the communication between the
developers of bug reports in Microsoft and observed
that many bugs are discussed before they are
reported and this information is not stored within the
Issue Tracker. However, in open source projects,
many bugs are discussed in the bug tracking systems
(or mailing list) to ensure transparency and to
encourage developers who are geographically
distant.
Different works in the literature use bug reports
to automatically assign a bug to the developers
(Anvik et al., 2006), identify duplicate bugs (Jalbert
and Weimer, 2008) while others define guidelines
for assessing the severity of a bug (Menzies and
Marcus, 2008). Schroter et al. (Schroter et al.,
2010) showed the importance of the Stack Trace for
developers when they have to fix a bug.
Antoniol et al. (Antoniol et al., 2004) (Antoniol
et al., 2008) indicate the lack of integration between
the system of versioning and bug tracking system
which makes it difficult the location of the fault
within the system software, also in (Antoniol et al.,
2008) it is discussed that not all the bugs are
software problems but many indicate requests for
improvements.
Ko et al. (Ko et al., 2006) in order to design new
systems for reporting bugs have conducted a
linguistic analysis on the securities of the bug report.
They observed numerous references to software
entities, physical devices or user actions, suggesting
that the future system of systems Bug Tracking will
be to collect data in a very structured way.
Not all bug reports are generated by humans,
many systems of auto-detection of the bugs can
report safety violations and annotate them with
counter examples. Weimer (Weimer, 2006) presents
an algorithm to build patches automatically as it
shows that the report accompanied by patches have
three times more likely to be localized within the
code with respect to a standard report. Users can
also help developers fix bugs without depositing the
bug report, for example, many products
automatically report information on the crash such
as Apple CrashReporter, Windows Error Reporting,
Gnome BugBuddy.
Hooimejer and Weimer (Hooimeijer and
Weimer, 2007) proposed a descriptive model of
quality bug reports based on statistical analysis of
over 27,000 reports related to the open source
project Mozilla Firefox. The model is designed to
predict if a bug is fixed within a time limits in order
to reduce the cost of bug triage. It leads the
implications on the bug tracking system highlighting
the features to be added when creating a bug report.
The model proposed by Hooimejer and Weimer
(Hooimeijer and Weimer, 2007) classifies bug
reports based on the characteristics that can be
extracted by the same bug report excluding features
that require to compare the report with earlier
reports, such as the similarity of the text. The
features of the model includes the Severity, the
Readability Measures, and Submitter Reputation.
Finally, the authors consider the number of
comments made in response to the bug and the
number of attachment. The results presented show
that the bug with high number of comments are
resolved in less time. Furthermore, the measure of
readability indicated that the bugs fixed in a short
time are easy to understand and highly readable.
Finally the results of Hooimejer Weimer and
(Hooimeijer and Weimer, 2007) show that some
characteristics, contrary to what is believed, have no
significant effect on the model, such as the severity
of the bug.
A significant contribution to the quality of bug
reports was provided by the work of Zimmermann et
al. (Zimmermann et al., 2010), where is defined a
quality model of a bug report.
Zimmermann et al. (Zimmermann et al., 2010)
propose a quality model for bug reports in order and
implemented a prototype that helps users to insert
the appropriate information while reporting a bug.