On the Assessment of Security and Performance Bugs in Chromium Open-Source Project

Abstract

An individual working in software development should have a fundamental understanding of how different types of bugs impact various project aspects. This knowledge allows one to improve the quality of the created software. The problem, however, is that previous research typically treats all types of bugs as similar when analyzing several aspects of software quality (e.g. predicting the time to fix a bug) or concentrates on a particular bug type (e.g. performance bugs) with little comparison to other types. In this paper, we look at how different types of bugs, specifically performance and security bugs, differ from one another. Our study is based on a previous study done by Zaman et al. [1] in which the study was performed on the FireFox project. Instead of Firefox, we will be working with the Chrome web-browser. In our case study, we find that security bugs are fixed faster than performance bugs and that the developers who were assigned to security bugs typically have more experience than the ones assigned to performance bugs. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering the different types of bugs in software quality research and practice.