TY - GEN
T1 - A cross-platform analysis of bugs and bug-fixing in open source projects
T2 - 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, EASE 2015
AU - Zhou, Bo
AU - Neamtiu, Iulian
AU - Gupta, Rajiv
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright 2015 ACM.
PY - 2015/4/27
Y1 - 2015/4/27
N2 - As smartphones continue to increase in popularity, understanding how software processes associated with the smartphone platform differ from the traditional desktop platform is critical for improving user experience and facilitating software development and maintenance. In this paper we focus specifically on differences in bugs and bug-fixing processes between desktop and smartphone software. Our study covers 444,129 bug reports in 88 open source projects on desktop, Android, and iOS. The study has two main thrusts: a quantitative analysis to discover similarities and differences between desktop and smartphone bug reports/processes; and a qualitative analysis where we extract topics from bug reports to understand bugs' nature, categories, and differences between platforms. Our findings include: during 2011{2013, iOS bugs were fixed three times faster compared to Android and desktop; top smartphone bug fixers are more involved in reporting bugs than top desktop bug fixers; and most frequent high-severity bugs are due to build issues on desktop, concurrency on Android, and application logic on iOS. Our study, findings, and recommendations are potentially useful to smartphone researchers and practitioners.
AB - As smartphones continue to increase in popularity, understanding how software processes associated with the smartphone platform differ from the traditional desktop platform is critical for improving user experience and facilitating software development and maintenance. In this paper we focus specifically on differences in bugs and bug-fixing processes between desktop and smartphone software. Our study covers 444,129 bug reports in 88 open source projects on desktop, Android, and iOS. The study has two main thrusts: a quantitative analysis to discover similarities and differences between desktop and smartphone bug reports/processes; and a qualitative analysis where we extract topics from bug reports to understand bugs' nature, categories, and differences between platforms. Our findings include: during 2011{2013, iOS bugs were fixed three times faster compared to Android and desktop; top smartphone bug fixers are more involved in reporting bugs than top desktop bug fixers; and most frequent high-severity bugs are due to build issues on desktop, concurrency on Android, and application logic on iOS. Our study, findings, and recommendations are potentially useful to smartphone researchers and practitioners.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84961133895&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84961133895&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2745802.2745808
DO - 10.1145/2745802.2745808
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84961133895
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
BT - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering, EASE 2015
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 27 April 2015 through 29 April 2015
ER -