Locating Bug IDs and Development Logs in Open Source Software (OSS) projects: An Experience Report

Romo, Bilyaminu Auwal, Capiluppi, Andrea and Ali, Ajaz (2019) Locating Bug IDs and Development Logs in Open Source Software (OSS) projects: An Experience Report. In: 2018 International Conference on Innovation and Intelligence for Informatics, Computing, and Technologies (3ICT). IEEE, Sakhier, Bahrain, pp. 1-10. ISBN Electronic ISBN: 978-1-5386-9207-3; Print on Demand (PoD) ISBN: 978-1-5386-9208-0

Abstract

The development logs of software projects, contained in Version Control (VC) systems can be severely incomplete when tracking bugs, especially in open source projects, resulting in a reduced traceability of defects. Other times, such logs can contain bug information that is not available in bug tracking system (BT system) repositories, and vice-versa: if the development logs and bug related-data (i.e., BT system data) were used together, researchers and practitioners often would have a larger set of bug IDs for a software project, and a better picture of a bug life cycle, its evolution and maintenance. Considering a sample of 10 OSS projects and their development logs and BT systems data, the two objectives of this paper are (i) to determine which of the keywords `Fix', `Bug' or the `#' identifier provide better precision; and (ii) to analyse their respective precision and recall at locating the larger amount possible of bug IDs manually. Overall, our results suggest that the use of the `#' identifier in conjunction with the bug ID digits (e.g., #1234) is more precise for locating bugs in development logs, than the use of the `Bug' and `Fix' keywords. Such keywords are indeed present in the development logs, but they are less useful when trying to connect the development actions with the bug traces in software project.

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