Evaluating the Veracity of Software Bug Reports using Entropy-based Measures

Abstract

The wide usage of open source software (OSS) results in an increase of bug data forming an integral part of the extensive data ecosystem. This bug report data needs to be analyzed for bug fixing and prediction of various important attributes like bug severity, priority, fix time, assignees, etc. The increased volume of bug data and different bug reporters from different geographical locations make veracity an important concern. We assume that the bug reports (i.e., different bug attributes) reported in software bug repositories are trustworthy during the bug triaging process. In reality, the bug report data are not trustworthy regarding various aspects like integrity, authenticity, and trusted origin as the bugs are reported by users who may or may not have proper knowledge of the software. In this paper, we proposed entropy-based models for veracity estimation of different bug attributes.