The significance of bug report elements

Abstract

AbstractOpen source software projects often use issue repositories, where project contributors submit bug reports. Using these repositories, more bugs in software projects may be identified and fixed. However, the content and therefore quality of bug reports vary. In this study, we aim to understand the significance of different elements in bug reports. We interviewed 35 developers to gain insights into their perceptions on the importance of various contents in bug reports. To assess our findings, we surveyed 305 developers. The results show developers find it highly important that bug reports include crash description, reproducing steps or test cases, and stack traces. Software version, fix suggestions, code snippets, and attached contents have lower importance for software debugging. Furthermore, to evaluate the quality of currently available bug reports, we mined issue repositories of 250 most popular projects on Github. Statistical analysis on the mined issues shows that crash reproducing steps, stack traces, fix suggestions, and user contents, have statistically significant impact on bug resolution times, for ∼70%, ∼76%, ∼55%, and ∼33% of the projects. However, on avarage, over 70% of bug reports lack these elements.