Duplicate bug reports considered harmful … really?

Author

Bettenburg, Nicolas ; Premraj, Rahul ; Zimmermann, Thomas ; Kim, Sunghun

Author_Institution

Saarland Univ., Saarbrucken

fYear

2008

fDate

Sept. 28 2008-Oct. 4 2008

Firstpage

337

Lastpage

345

Abstract

In a survey we found that most developers have experienced duplicated bug reports, however, only few considered them as a serious problem. This contradicts popular wisdom that considers bug duplicates as a serious problem for open source projects. In the survey, developers also pointed out that the additional information provided by duplicates helps to resolve bugs quicker. In this paper, we therefore propose to merge bug duplicates, rather than treating them separately. We quantify the amount of information that is added for developers and show that automatic triaging can be improved as well. In addition, we discuss the different reasons why users submit duplicate bug reports in the first place.

Keywords

program debugging; public domain software; software maintenance; duplicate bug; open source projects; software maintenance; Automatic testing; Capacitive sensors; Computer bugs; Hydrogen; Information services; Internet; Predictive models; Programming; Software maintenance; Web sites;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Maintenance, 2008. ICSM 2008. IEEE International Conference on

Conference_Location

Beijing

ISSN

1063-6773

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2613-3

Electronic_ISBN

1063-6773

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICSM.2008.4658082

Filename

4658082