BugTracking: A tool to assist in the identification of bug reports

Abstract

Issue tracking systems are used, in most software projects, but in particular in almost all free open source software, to record many different kinds of issues: bug reports, feature requests, maintenance tickets and even design discussions. Identifying which of those issues are bug reports is not a trivial task. When researchers want to conduct studies on the bug reports, managed by a software development project, first of all they need to perform this identification. The job for researchers here is very different from the bug triaging that researchers do. In the latter case, people with a considerate experience in the project make a decision based on the information available at that time (maybe just a short comment by some user), asking, if needed, for more details. In the former case, researchers usually have not that experience in the project, but they have at their use all the information produced, until the moment the issue was closed. This may include not only all comments and actions on the issue tracking system, but for example, discussions about a fix in the code review system, or the final fixing patch in the source code management system. Having all that information conveyed to the researchers, in an easy, flexible and quick way, accelerates and makes their decision process much more reliable. It simplifies large scale manual analysis of issues (in hundreds or thousands), helping researchers to ensure that they are really working with what they intend to work: bug reports. This paper presents a tool designed to solve exactly the problem of providing the researchers with all the relevant information needed to decide whether an issue corresponds to a bug report or not. The tool uses information extracted automatically from the projects repositories. It offers a web-based interface which allows collaboration, traceability and transparency of the identification of bug reports. All this makes the process easier, faster, and more reliable.