research-article

An Empirical Study on Critical Blocking Bugs

Authors:

Lin ChenAuthors Info & Claims

ICPC '20: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

Pages 72 - 82

https://doi.org/10.1145/3387904.3389267

Published: 12 September 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Blocking bugs are a severe type of bugs that prevent other bugs from being fixed. As software becomes increasingly complex and large, blocking bugs occur in many large-scale software, especially in software ecosystems. Blocking bugs may have a high negative impact on software development and maintenance. Usually, blocking bugs preventing more bugs should be more concerned. In this paper, we focus on a special type of blocking bugs that block at least two bugs, which we call Critical Blocking Bugs (CBBs).

We study CBBs from the following five aspects: the importance, the repair time, the scale of repair, the experience of developers who repair CBBs, and the circumstance why CBBs block multiple bugs. We build a dataset containing five open source projects and classify bugs into three types (i.e., critical blocking bugs, normal blocking bugs and other bugs, which block at least two, just one and zero bugs, respectively) to compare the differences between CBBs and other types of bugs. The experimental results show that CBBs are more important with longer repair time and larger repair scale, and CBBs are concentrated on parts of components of the project. These results highlight that CBBs are different from other types of bugs in many aspects, and we should pay more attention to such bugs in the future software maintenance process.

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Cited By

Jiang MJiang JWu TMa ZLuo XZhou Y(2024)Understanding Vulnerability Inducing Commits of the Linux KernelACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367245233:7(1-28)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672452
Ren HLi YChen LZhou YNie C(2024)Why and how bug blocking relations are breakableInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107354166:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107354
Chen ZJu XShen YChen X(2021)Improving Blocking Bug Pair Prediction via Hybrid Deep Learning2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C55045.2021.00110(727-732)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS-C55045.2021.00110

Index Terms

An Empirical Study on Critical Blocking Bugs
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Software management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Software defect analysis
        Software testing and debugging
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. Software configuration management and version control systems

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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cover image ACM Conferences

ICPC '20: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

July 2020

481 pages

ISBN:9781450379588

DOI:10.1145/3387904

Copyright © 2020 ACM.

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Published: 12 September 2020

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ICPC '20: 28th International Conference on Program Comprehension

July 13 - 15, 2020

Seoul, Republic of Korea

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Cited By

Jiang MJiang JWu TMa ZLuo XZhou Y(2024)Understanding Vulnerability Inducing Commits of the Linux KernelACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367245233:7(1-28)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3672452
Ren HLi YChen LZhou YNie C(2024)Why and how bug blocking relations are breakableInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107354166:COnline publication date: 1-Feb-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107354
Chen ZJu XShen YChen X(2021)Improving Blocking Bug Pair Prediction via Hybrid Deep Learning2021 IEEE 21st International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C)10.1109/QRS-C55045.2021.00110(727-732)Online publication date: Dec-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/QRS-C55045.2021.00110

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