A closer look at bugs

The evolution of non-trivial software systems is accompanied by unexpected behaviour and side-effects, referred as bugs or defects. These defects are reported to and stored in bug tracking systems, which contain descriptions of the problems that have been encountered. However, bug tracking systems store and present bug reports in textual form, which makes their understanding dispersive and unintuitive. We present an approach to display bug reports through a web-based visual analytics platform, named in*Bug. in*Bug allows users to navigate and inspect the vast information space created by bug tracking systems, with the goal of easing the comprehension of bug reports in detail and also obtain an understanding “in the large” of how bugs are reported with respect to one system or to an entire software ecosystem.