Towards the next generation of bug tracking systems

Author

Just, Sascha ; Premraj, Rahul ; Zimmermann, Thomas

Author_Institution

Saarland Univ., Saarbrucken

fYear

2008

fDate

15-19 Sept. 2008

Firstpage

82

Lastpage

85

Abstract

Developers typically rely on the information submitted by end-users to resolve bugs. We conducted a survey on information needs and commonly faced problems with bug reporting among several hundred developers and users of the APACHE, ECLIPSE and MOZILLA projects. In this paper, we present the results of a card sort on the 175 comments sent back to us by the responders of the survey. The card sort revealed several hurdles involved in reporting and resolving bugs, which we present in a collection of recommendations for the design of new bug tracking systems. Such systems could provide contextual assistance, reminders to add information, and most important, assistance to collect and report crucial information to developers.

Keywords

program debugging; systems analysis; tracking; APACHE project; ECLIPSE project; MOZILLA project; bug tracking systems; card sort; next generation; Cognitive science; Communication system software; Computer bugs; Feedback; Information analysis; Sorting; Spatial databases; Taxonomy; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 2008. VL/HCC 2008. IEEE Symposium on

Conference_Location

Herrsching am Ammersee

ISSN

1943-6092

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2528-0

Electronic_ISBN

1943-6092

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VLHCC.2008.4639063

Filename

4639063