It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction

Submitted by msquire on Sun, 2013-05-19 17:19

Title	It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature: How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction
Publication Type	Conference Proceedings
Year of Publication	2013
Authors	Herzig, K, Just, S, Zeller, A
Refereed Designation	Refereed
Secondary Title	35th Int'l Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013)
Pagination	392-401
Date Published	05/2013
Keywords	bias, bug reports, data quality, mining software repositories, noise
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.
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