On predicting the time taken to correct bug reports in open source projects

Existing studies on the maintenance of open source projects focus primarily on the analyses of the overall maintenance of the projects and less on specific categories like the corrective maintenance. This paper presents results from an empirical study of bug reports from an open source project, identifies user participation in the corrective maintenance process through bug reports, and constructs a model to predict the corrective maintenance effort for the project in terms of the time taken to correct faults. Our study focuses on 72482 bug reports from over nine releases of Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. We present three main results: (1) 95% of the bug reports are corrected by people participating in groups of size ranging from 1 to 8 people, (2) there is a strong linear relationship (about 92%) between the number of people participating in a bug report and the time taken to correct it, (3) a linear model can be used to predict the time taken to correct bug reports.