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Characterizing Bug Workflows in Mozilla Firefox

Published: 19 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Bug handling represents a major effort in most software projects. To improve this relevant task, software organizations must first understand the current status of their bug resolution process. Although there are plentiful research in bug reports, few of them address the bug handling workflow to better understand and reason about the maintenance process. To this purpose, we report a characterization study focused on the typical workflow followed by Mozilla Firefox developers when resolving bugs. We propose the concept of Bug Flow Graphs (BFG) to help understand the characterization. We analyze 13,564 bugs reported for Firefox in 2015 and we discovered some interesting characteristics of Firefox's bug workflow: (a) when a bug is not formally assigned to a developer it requires ten more days to be resolved; (b) approximately 94% of duplicate bugs are closed within two days or less after they appear in the tracking system (which reveals the efficiency of Firefox's duplicate bug detection procedures); (c) incomplete bugs, which are never assigned to developers, usually require 70 days to be closed; (d) more skilled developers show a faster resolution time than less skilled ones; (e) for less skilled developers a bug usually spends more time waiting to be assigned than being fixed.

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  • (2024)An Empirical Analysis of Issue Templates Usage in Large-Scale Projects on GitHubACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/364367333:5(1-28)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Analyzing Bug Life Cycles to Derive Practical InsightsProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593504(162-171)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
  • (2023)BERT- and TF-IDF-based feature extraction for long-lived bug prediction in FLOSS: A comparative studyInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107217160(107217)Online publication date: Aug-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SBES '16: Proceedings of the XXX Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 2016
167 pages
ISBN:9781450342018
DOI:10.1145/2973839
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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  • SBC: Brazilian Computer Society

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. Bug Flow Graph (BFG)
  2. Bug Workflow
  3. Characterization Study
  4. Life Cycle of a Bug
  5. Mozilla Firefox

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  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

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SBES '16
SBES '16: 30th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering
September 19 - 23, 2016
Maringá, Brazil

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Overall Acceptance Rate 147 of 427 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)An Empirical Analysis of Issue Templates Usage in Large-Scale Projects on GitHubACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/364367333:5(1-28)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Analyzing Bug Life Cycles to Derive Practical InsightsProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593504(162-171)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
  • (2023)BERT- and TF-IDF-based feature extraction for long-lived bug prediction in FLOSS: A comparative studyInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107217160(107217)Online publication date: Aug-2023
  • (2022)Taxonomy of bug tracking process smellsInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2022.106972150:COnline publication date: 4-Aug-2022
  • (2022)Characterizing duplicate bugs: Perceptions of practitioners and an empirical analysisJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.2446Online publication date: Mar-2022
  • (2021)Towards a Taxonomy of Bug Tracking Process Smells: A Quantitative Analysis2021 47th Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications (SEAA)10.1109/SEAA53835.2021.00026(138-147)Online publication date: Sep-2021
  • (2021)Characterizing Duplicate Bugs: An Empirical Analysis2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER)10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00084(661-668)Online publication date: Mar-2021
  • (2020)Open Source Software Development Process: A Systematic Review2020 IEEE 24th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC)10.1109/EDOC49727.2020.00025(135-144)Online publication date: Oct-2020
  • (undefined)Bert-Based Feature Extraction for Long-Lived Bug Prediction in Floss: A Comparative StudySSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4166555

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