Filtering Bug Reports for Fix-Time Analysis

Several studies have experimented with data mining algorithms to predict the fix-time of reported bugs. Unfortunately, the fix-times as reported in typical open-source cases are heavily skewed with a significant amount of reports registering fix-times less than a few minutes. Consequently, we propose to include an additional filtering step to improve the quality of the underlying data in order to gain better results. Using a small-scale replication of a previously published bug fix-time prediction experiment, we show that the additional filtering of reported bugs indeed improves the outcome of the results.