Browsing by Subject "Bug tracking system"

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    Analyzing bug life cycles to derive practical insights
    (Association for Computing Machinery, 2023-06-14) Eren, Çağrı; Şahin, Kerem; Tüzün, Eray
    In this study, we assess bug life cycles to identify bottlenecks in the bug tracking processes, and examine the effectiveness of bug tracking system usage practices linked to bug states and state transitions. To achieve this, we examined the bug life cycles of three opensource software projects which use Bugzilla as their bug tracking system. In total, we have analyzed 106.196 bugs gathered from these projects. We started by looking at the temporal and quantitative aspects of these projects’ bug life cycles. After that, we collected data about how bug life cycles differ over time. Finally, we inspected the frequency of reopened and state-looping bugs in these projects. After our analysis, we have deduced that the presented temporal and quantitative analysis of bug life cycles is useful for finding bottlenecks and undesired behaviors in the bug tracking processes. We also inferred that examining the changes in bug life cycles over time can provide insights into how bug tracking practices changed throughout the project’s lifetime, and it can be used as a parameter to assess whether the bug tracking system usage has improved. Lastly, we deducted that analyzing undesired state trails’ frequency provides insights into the performance of bug tracking processes. Based on the insights gained from analyzing bug life cycles with the presented methods, we believe that decision makers can improve their workflow by introducing or removing new states to the bug life cycle and adding new rules and restrictions to their bug tracking process.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Bug tracking process smells in practice
    (IEEE Computer Society, 2022-05-27) Jabrayilzade, Elgun; Evtikhiev, Mikhail; Tüzün, Eray; Kovalenko, Vladimir
    Software teams use bug tracking (BT) tools to report and manage bugs. Each record in a bug tracking system (BTS) is a reporting entity consisting of several information fields. The contents of the reports are similar across different tracking tools, though not the same. The variation in the workflow between teams prevents defining an ideal process of running BTS. Nevertheless, there are best practices reported both in white and gray literature. Developer teams may not adopt the best practices in their BT process. This study investigates the non-compliance of developers with best practices, so-called smells, in the BT process. We mine bug reports of four projects in the BTS of JetBrains, a software company, to observe the prevalence of BT smells in an industrial setting. Also, we survey developers to see (1) if they recognize the smells, (2) their perception of the severity of the smells, and (3) the potential benefits of a BT process smell detection tool. We found that (1) smells occur, and their detection requires a solid understanding of the BT practices of the projects, (2) smell severity perception varies across smell types, and (3) developers considered that a smell detection tool would be useful for six out of the 12 smell categories.
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    ItemOpen Access
    Bug tracking process smells in practice
    (IEEE Computer Society, 2022-05-27) Tuna, Erdem; Kovalenko, Vladimir; Tüzün, Eray
    Software teams use bug tracking (BT) tools to report and manage bugs. Each record in a bug tracking system (BTS) is a reporting entity consisting of several information fields. The contents of the reports are similar across different tracking tools, though not the same. The variation in the workflow between teams prevents defining an ideal process of running BTS. Nevertheless, there are best practices reported both in white and gray literature. Developer teams may not adopt the best practices in their BT process. This study investigates the non-compliance of developers with best practices, so-called smells, in the BT process. We mine bug reports of four projects in the BTS of JetBrains, a software company, to observe the prevalence of BT smells in an industrial setting. Also, we survey developers to see (1) if they recognize the smells, (2) their perception of the severity of the smells, and (3) the potential benefits of a BT process smell detection tool. We found that (1) smells occur, and their detection requires a solid understanding of the BT practices of the projects, (2) smell severity perception varies across smell types, and (3) developers considered that a smell detection tool would be useful for six out of the 12 smell categories. © 2022 IEEE.