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It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature: How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction - ICSE 2013
by Kim Herzig, Sascha Just, Andreas Zeller

ICSE '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering, Pages 392-401, IEEE Press, June 2013.

ISBN: 978-1-4673-3076-3

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Abstract

In a manual examination of more than 7,000 issue reports from the bug databases of five open-source projects, we found 33.8% of all bug reports to be misclassified?that is, rather than referring to a code fix, they resulted in a new feature, an update to documentation, or an internal refactoring. This misclassification introduces bias in bug prediction models, confusing bugs and features: On average, 39% of files marked as defective actually never had a bug. We discuss the impact of this misclassification on earlier studies and recommend manual data validation for future studies.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{herzig-icse-2013,
    title = "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature: How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction",
    author = "Kim Herzig and Sascha Just and Andreas Zeller",
    year = "2013",
    month = jun,
    booktitle = "ICSE '13: Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering",
    location = "San Fancisco, CA, USA",
    pages = "392--401",
    publisher = "IEEE Press",
    ISBN = "978-1-4673-3076-3",
}

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