TY - GEN
T1 - An empirical analysis of bug reports and bug fixing in open source Android apps
AU - Bhattacharya, Pamela
AU - Ulanova, Liudmila
AU - Neamtiu, Iulian
AU - Koduru, Sai Charan
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Smartphone platforms and applications (apps) have gained tremendous popularity recently. Due to the novelty of the smartphone platform and tools, and the low barrier to entry for app distribution, apps are prone to errors, which affects user experience and requires frequent bug fixes. An essential step towards correcting this situation is understanding the nature of the bugs and bug-fixing processes associated with smartphone platforms and apps. However, prior empirical bug studies have focused mostly on desktop and server applications. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study on bugs in the Google Android smartphone platform and 24 widely-used open-source Android apps from diverse categories such as communication, tools, and media. Our analysis has three main thrusts. First, we define several metrics to understand the quality of bug reports and analyze the bug-fix process, including developer involvement. Second, we show how differences in bug life-cycles can affect the bug-fix process. Third, as Android devices carry significant amounts of security-sensitive information, we perform a study of Android security bugs. We found that, although contributor activity in these projects is generally high, developer involvement decreases in some projects, similarly, while bug-report quality is high, bug triaging is still a problem. Finally, we observe that in Android apps, security bug reports are of higher quality but get fixed slower than non-security bugs. We believe that the findings of our study could potentially benefit both developers and users of Android apps.
AB - Smartphone platforms and applications (apps) have gained tremendous popularity recently. Due to the novelty of the smartphone platform and tools, and the low barrier to entry for app distribution, apps are prone to errors, which affects user experience and requires frequent bug fixes. An essential step towards correcting this situation is understanding the nature of the bugs and bug-fixing processes associated with smartphone platforms and apps. However, prior empirical bug studies have focused mostly on desktop and server applications. Therefore, in this paper, we perform an in-depth empirical study on bugs in the Google Android smartphone platform and 24 widely-used open-source Android apps from diverse categories such as communication, tools, and media. Our analysis has three main thrusts. First, we define several metrics to understand the quality of bug reports and analyze the bug-fix process, including developer involvement. Second, we show how differences in bug life-cycles can affect the bug-fix process. Third, as Android devices carry significant amounts of security-sensitive information, we perform a study of Android security bugs. We found that, although contributor activity in these projects is generally high, developer involvement decreases in some projects, similarly, while bug-report quality is high, bug triaging is still a problem. Finally, we observe that in Android apps, security bug reports are of higher quality but get fixed slower than non-security bugs. We believe that the findings of our study could potentially benefit both developers and users of Android apps.
KW - Google Android
KW - bug fixing
KW - bug reports
KW - empirical studies
KW - security bugs
KW - smartphone apps
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84877264939&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84877264939&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/CSMR.2013.23
DO - 10.1109/CSMR.2013.23
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84877264939
SN - 9780769549484
T3 - Proceedings of the European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, CSMR
SP - 133
EP - 143
BT - Proceedings of the 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, CSMR 2013
T2 - 17th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, CSMR 2013
Y2 - 5 March 2013 through 8 March 2013
ER -