A Pilot Study of Diversity in High Impact Bugs

Since increasing complexity and scale of modern software products imposes tight scheduling and resource allocations on software development projects, a project manager must carefully triage bugs to determine which bug should be necessarily fixed before shipping. Although in the field of Mining Software Repositories (MSR) there are many promising approaches to predicting, localizing, and triaging bugs, most of them do not consider impacts of each bug on users and developers but rather treat all bugs with equal weighting, excepting a few studies on high impact bugs including security, performance, blocking, and so forth. To make MSR techniques more actionable and effective in practice, we need deeper understandings of high impact bugs. In this paper we report our pilot study on high impact bugs, which classifies bugs reported to four open source projects into six types of high impact bugs.