Are There Language Specific Bug Patterns? Results Obtained from a Case Study Using Mozilla

Author

Ahsan, Syed Nadeem ; Ferzund, Javed ; Wotawa, Franz

Author_Institution

Inst. for Software Technol., Tech. Univ. Graz, Graz, Austria

fYear

2009

fDate

20-25 Sept. 2009

Firstpage

210

Lastpage

215

Abstract

A lot of information can be obtained from configuration management systems and post-release bug databases like Bugzilla. In this paper we focus on the question whether there are language specific bug patterns in large programs. For this purpose we implemented a system for extracting the necessary information from the Mozilla project files. A comparison of the extracted information with respect to the programming language showed that there are bug patterns specific to programming languages. In particular we found that Java files of the Mozilla project are less error prone than C and C++ files. Moreover, we found out that the bug lifetime when using Java was almost double the lifetime of bugs in C or C++ file.

Keywords

C++ language; Java; data mining; program debugging; Bugzilla; C files; C++ files; Java files; Mozilla; configuration management systems; information extraction; language specific bug patterns; post-release bug databases; programming language; Computer bugs; Computer errors; Computer languages; Data mining; Databases; Java; Lab-on-a-chip; Open source software; Software engineering; Testing; bugs; error patterns; faults; programming-language;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Engineering Advances, 2009. ICSEA '09. Fourth International Conference on

Conference_Location

Porto

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-4779-4

Electronic_ISBN

978-0-7695-3777-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSEA.2009.41

Filename

5298423