Experience report: How do bug characteristics differ across severity classes: A multi-platform study

Bo Zhou, Iulian Neamtiu, Rajiv Gupta

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

Bugs of different severities have so far been put into the same category, but their characteristics differ significantly. Moreover, the nature of issues with the same severity, e.g., high, differs markedly between desktops and smartphones. To understand these differences, we perform an empirical study on 72 Android and desktop projects. We first define three bug severity classes: high, medium, and low. Next, we study how severity changes and quantify differences between classes in terms of bug-fixing attributes. Then, we focus on topic differences: using LDA, we extract topics associated with each severity class, and study how these topics differ across classes, platforms, and over time. Our findings include: severity and priority affect bug fixing time; medium-severity contributors are more experienced than high-severity contributors; and there have been more concurrency and cloud-related high-severity bugs on desktop since 2009, while on Android concurrency bugs are prevalent.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages507-517
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781509004065
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 13 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015 - Gaithersbury, United States
Duration: Nov 2 2015Nov 5 2015

Publication series

Name2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015

Other

Other26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, ISSRE 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityGaithersbury
Period11/2/1511/5/15

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality

Keywords

  • Bug severity
  • bug report
  • cross-platform analysis
  • topic model

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