Not all bugs are the same

Understanding, characterizing, and classifying bug types

Journal article (2019)

Authors

G. Catolino University of Salerno
F. Palomba University of Zürich
A.E. Zaidman Software Engineering - EEMCS
Filomena Ferrucci University of Salerno
Research Group
Software Engineering (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2019 G. Catolino, F. Palomba, A.E. Zaidman, Filomena Ferrucci
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2019.03.002
Empirical study Taxonomy Bug classification
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Published Date

2019

Language

English

Reuse Rights

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Software Technology

Research Group

Software Engineering

Abstract

Modern version control systems, e.g., GitHub, include bug tracking mechanisms that developers can use to highlight the presence of bugs. This is done by means of bug reports, i.e., textual descriptions reporting the problem and the steps that led to a failure. In past and recent years, the research community deeply investigated methods for easing bug triage, that is, the process of assigning the fixing of a reported bug to the most qualified developer. Nevertheless, only a few studies have reported on how to support developers in the process of understanding the type of a reported bug, which is the first and most time-consuming step to perform before assigning a bug-fix operation. In this paper, we target this problem in two ways: first, we analyze 1280 bug reports of 119 popular projects belonging to three ecosystems such as MOZILLA, APACHE, and ECLIPSE, with the aim of building a taxonomy of the types of reported bugs; then, we devise and evaluate an automated classification model able to classify reported bugs according to the defined taxonomy. As a result, we found nine main common bug types over the considered systems. Moreover, our model achieves high F-Measure and AUC-ROC (64% and 74% on overall, respectively).