%0 Conference Paper %B Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007) %D 2007 %T How Long Will It Take to Fix This Bug? %A Weiss, Cathrin %A Premraj, Rahul %A Zimmermann, Thomas %A Zeller, Andreas %K bug fixing %K bug reports %K effort estimation %K jboss %K lucene %K prediction %K time %X Predicting the time and effort for a software problem has long been a difficult task. We present an approach that automatically predicts the fixing effort, i.e., the person-hours spent on fixing an issue. Our technique leverages existing issue tracking systems: given a new issue report, we use the Lucene framework to search for similar, earlier reports and use their average time as a prediction. Our approach thus allows for early effort estimation, helping in assigning issues and scheduling stable releases. We evaluated our approach using effort data from the JBoss project. Given a sufficient number of issues reports, our automatic predictions are close to the actual effort; for issues that are bugs, we are off by only one hour, beating naive predictions by a factor of four. %B Fourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007) %I IEEE %C Minneapolis, MN, USA %P 1 %@ 0-7695-2950-X %R 10.1109/MSR.2007.13 %> https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/28300001.pdf