Open Source Systems Bug Reports: Meta-Analysis

Abstract

Bug Tracking System (BTS) is a wealthy source of software development information. They contain many insights about the health status of the software project. Making sense of this information is a big challenge to software development communities. In this work, we perform an investigation on fixing time, components, and platforms related to five open source systems hosted by Bugzilla. The motive is to identify what are the most error-prone components and to allocate the right developer to fix the bug. The results are indicators for how data in BTS should be utilized for decision-making processes. The results reveal a strong relationship between bugs and committers, where it is seen that committer is usually related to fixing a single domain of bugs that also shows their expertise. This study can also help in the automated classification of bug allocation to the right kind of committers instead of manual allocation that will result in a reduction of fixing time and interloping between different committers.