How Long Will It Take to Fix This Bug?

TitleHow Long Will It Take to Fix This Bug?
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2007
AuthorsWeiss, C, Premraj, R, Zimmermann, T, Zeller, A
Secondary TitleFourth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories (MSR'07:ICSE Workshops 2007)
Pagination1
PublisherIEEE
Place PublishedMinneapolis, MN, USA
ISBN Number0-7695-2950-X
Keywordsbug fixing, bug reports, effort estimation, jboss, lucene, prediction, time
Abstract

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.

DOI10.1109/MSR.2007.13
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