This is an archive of the old software engineering chair at Saarland University. It is no longer up-to-date.

What Makes a Good Bug Report? - Technical Report
by Nicolas Bettenburg, Sascha Just, Adrian Schröter, Cathrin Weiss, Rahul Premraj, Thomas Zimmermann

Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany, September 2007. This technical report is superceded by a more recent revision. Please cite revision 1.1 of this report.

Download as PDF file.

See also

More information is available at http://www.st.cs.uni-saarland.de/softevo/bugreports.php.

Abstract

The information in bug reports influences the speed at which bugs are fixed. However, bug reports differ in their quality of information. In order to determine the elements that developer widely use to fix bugs and the problems frequently encountered, we conducted a survey among APACHE, ECLIPSE, and MOZILLA developers. The analysis of the 156 responses shows that steps to reproduce and stack traces are most sought after, while inaccurate steps to reproduce and incomplete information pose the largest hurdles. This insight is helpful to design new bug tracking tools that guide reporters at providing more helpful information. Our CUEZILLA prototype is a such tool and provides reporters with feedback on the quality of new bug reports and recommends to add missing elements. We trained CUEZILLA on a sample of 289 bug reports, rated by developers as part of the survey. In our evaluation, CUEZILLA was able to predict the quality of 31-48% of bugs reports accurately.

BibTeX Entry

@techreport{bettenburg-tr-2007,
    title = "What Makes a Good Bug Report?",
    author = "Nicolas Bettenburg and Sascha Just and Adrian Schröter and Cathrin Weiss and Rahul Premraj and Thomas
Zimmermann",
    year = "2007",
    month = sep,
    institution = "Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany",
}

Show all publications of the Software Engineering Chair.