Bug Maps: A Tool for the Visual Exploration and Analysis of Bugs

To harness the complexity of big legacy software, software engineering tools need more and more information on these systems. This information may come from analysis of the source code, study of execution traces, computing of metrics, etc. One source of information received less attention than source code: the bugs on the system. Little is known about the evolutionary behavior, lifetime, distribution, and stability of bugs. In this paper, we propose to consider bugs as first class entities and a useful source of information that can answer such topics. Such analysis is inherently complex, because bugs are intangible, invisible, and difficult to be traced. Therefore, our tool extracts information about bugs from bug tracking systems, link this information to other software artifacts, and explore interactive visualizations of bugs that we call bug maps.