Understanding Expressions of Unwanted Behaviors in Open Bug Reporting

Open bug reporting allows end-users to express a vast array of unwanted software behaviors. However, users´ expectations often clash with developers´ implementation intents. We created a classification of seven common expectation violations cited by end-users in bug report descriptions and applied it to 1,000 bug reports from the Mozilla project. Our results show that users largely described bugs as violations of their own personal expectations, of specifications, or of the user community´s expectations. We found a correlation between a reporter´s expression of which expectation was being violated and whether or not the bug would eventually be fixed. Specifically, when bugs were expressed as violations of community expectations rather than personal expectations, they had a better chance of being fixed.