An Initial Study of Customer-Reported GUI Defects

End customers increasingly access the delivered functionality in software systems through a GUI. Unfortunately, limited data is currently available on how defects in these systems affect customers. This paper presents a study of customer-reported GUI defects from two different industrial software systems developed at ABB. This study includes data on defect impact, location, and resolution times. The results show that (1) 65% of the defects resulted in a loss of some functionality to the end customer, (2) the majority of the defects found (60%) were in the GUI, as opposed to the application itself, and (3) defects in the GUI took longer to fix, on average, than defects in the underlying application. The results are now being used to improve testing activities at ABB.