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The bug report duplication problem: an exploratory study

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Abstract

Duplicate bug report entries in bug trackers have a negative impact on software maintenance and evolution. This is due, among other factors, to the increased time spent on report analysis and validation, which in some cases takes over 20 min. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost in duplicate bug report analysis. In order to understand the possible factors that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development, this paper presents an exploratory study in which bug tracking data from private and open source projects were analyzed. The results show, for example, that all projects we investigated had duplicate bug reports and a considerable amount of time was wasted by this duplication. Furthermore, features such as project lifetime, staff size, and the number of bug reports do not seem to be significant factors for duplication, while others, such as the submitters’ profile and the number of submitters, do seem to influence the bug report duplication.

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Notes

  1. In some environments, the term bug report is replaced by change request, request for enhancements, issue, ticket, or just bug.

  2. Recife center for advanced studies and systems. http://www.cesar.org.br.

  3. Stop words are words that do not improve the searches in information retrieval systems. Examples of stop words are the, of, should, themselves, etc. A comprehensive list of common stop words can be found in: http://www.ranks.nl/resources/stopwords.html.

  4. http://www.r-project.org/.

  5. This number was calculated by multiplying the average of bug reports per day by the average time spent with search and analysis of bug reports: (231.5 bugs × 12.5 min)/60–48 man-h.

  6. https://www.launchpad.net.

  7. http://www.mozilla.org/.

  8. A centroid, in this case, is a set of bug reports with high similarity among them.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES http://www.ines.org.br), funded by CNPq and FACEPE, grants 573964/2008-4 and APQ-1037-1.03/08 and CNPq grants 305968/2010-6, 559997/2010-8, 474766/2010-1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Informatics, Federal University of Pernambuco—CIn/UFPE, Pernambuco, Brazil

    Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, Tassio Vale & Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira

  2. Computer Science Department, Federal University of Bahia—DCC/UFBA, Bahia, Brazil

    Eduardo Santana de Almeida

  3. Computing Department, Federal University of São Carlos—DC/UFSCar, São Carlos, Brazil

    Daniel Lucrédio

  4. Reuse in Software Engineering—RiSE, Recife, Brazil

    Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Daniel Lucrédio, Tassio Vale, Eduardo Santana de Almeida & Silvio Romero de Lemos Meira

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  1. Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti
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Correspondence to Yguaratã Cerqueira Cavalcanti.

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Cavalcanti, Y.C., da Mota Silveira Neto, P.A., Lucrédio, D. et al. The bug report duplication problem: an exploratory study. Software Qual J 21, 39–66 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9164-5

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