Towards a simplification of the bug report form in eclipse

TitleTowards a simplification of the bug report form in eclipse
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2008
AuthorsHerraiz, I, German, DM, Gonzalez-Barahona, JM, Robles, G
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 2008 international working conference on Mining software repositories
Pagination145–148
PublisherACM
Place PublishedNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-60558-024-1
Keywordsbug fixing, bug report, bug tracking system, classification, eclipse, msr challenge, severity
Abstract

We believe that the bug report form of Eclipse contains too many fields, and that for some fields, there are too many options. In this MSR challenge report, we focus in the case of the severity field. That field contains seven different levels of severity. Some of them seem very similar, and it is hard to distinguish among them. Users assign severity, and developers give priority to the reports depending on their severity. However, if users can not distinguish well among the various severity options, they will probably assign different priorities to bugs that require the same priority. We study the mean time to close bugs reported in Eclipse, and how the severity assigned by users affects this time. The results shows that classifying by time to close, there are less clusters of bugs than levels of severity. We therefore conclude that there is a need to make a simpler bug report form.

URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1370750.1370786
DOI10.1145/1370750.1370786
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