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Do visual issue reports help developers fix bugs?: a preliminary study of using videos and images to report issues on GitHub

Published: 20 October 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Issue reports are a pivotal interface between developers and users for receiving information about bugs in their products. In practice, issue reports often have incorrect information or insufficient information to enable bugs to be reproduced, and this has the effect of delaying the entire bug-fixing process. To facilitate their bug-reproduction work, GitHub has provided a new feature that allows users to share videos (e.g., mp4 files.) Using such videos, reports can be made to developers about the details of bugs by recording the symptoms, reproduction steps, and other important aspects of bug information.
While such visual issue reports have the potential to significantly improve the bug-fixing process, no studies have empirically examined this impact. In this paper, we conduct a preliminary study to identify the characteristics of visual issue reports by comparing them with non-visual issue reports.
We collect 1,230 videos and 18,760 images from 226,286 issues on 4,173 publicly available repositories. Our preliminary analysis shows that issue reports with images are described in fewer words than non-visual issue reports. In addition, we observe that most discussions in visual issue reports are concerned with either conditions for reproduction (e.g., when) or GUI (e.g., pageviewcontroller.)

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Understanding the characteristics and the role of visual issue reportsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10459-329:4Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Understanding the Role of Images on Stack Overflow2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00059(377-388)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)RCGraph - A Tool to Integrate Readme and Commits through Temporal Knowledge Graphs2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00014(30-34)Online publication date: May-2023
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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ICPC '22: Proceedings of the 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension
    May 2022
    698 pages
    ISBN:9781450392983
    DOI:10.1145/3524610
    • Conference Chairs:
    • Ayushi Rastogi,
    • Rosalia Tufano,
    • General Chair:
    • Gabriele Bavota,
    • Program Chairs:
    • Venera Arnaoudova,
    • Sonia Haiduc
    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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    Published: 20 October 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. GitHub
    2. images
    3. issues
    4. videos

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    View all
    • (2024)Understanding the characteristics and the role of visual issue reportsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10459-329:4Online publication date: 10-Jun-2024
    • (2023)Understanding the Role of Images on Stack Overflow2023 IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR)10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00059(377-388)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2023)RCGraph - A Tool to Integrate Readme and Commits through Temporal Knowledge Graphs2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC)10.1109/ICPC58990.2023.00014(30-34)Online publication date: May-2023
    • (2023)More than React: Investigating the Role of Emoji Reaction in GitHub Pull RequestsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-023-10336-528:5Online publication date: 18-Sep-2023

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