Investigando bugs reabertos: um estudo de caso no Bugzilla.

Abstract

Among the typical activities of a software process, we can highlight the tasks of testing, analyzing, reporting and fixing bugs. Performing these tasks is important to identify common or complex errors during all stages of development, avoiding rework and delivering software with more quality and reliability [1]. In a bug report, the author usually provides details of the abnormality that has been occurring. Typically, a bug report is opened, the bug is fixed, and the report is closed. However, sometimes it is verified that the bug correction was not effective, either due to lack of a more objective description in the report, or due to difficulty in understanding on the part of the developer. Thus, it is necessary to reopen the bug, adding time to the development process, making the software more expensive. Therefore, it is important to investigate what can be done to mitigate such problems. In this work, we investigate the characteristics that lead a bug to be reopened. The results of this work can help end users and developers to better write bug reports, as well as developers to better understand and handle them. The study used a dataset extracted from the Bugzilla tool.