DocumentCode :
2329993
Title :
How Long Does a Bug Survive? An Empirical Study
Author :
Canfora, Gerardo ; Ceccarelli, Michele ; Cerulo, Luigi ; Penta, Massimiliano Di
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Eng.-RCOST, Univ. of Sannio, Benevento, Italy
fYear :
2011
fDate :
17-20 Oct. 2011
Firstpage :
191
Lastpage :
200
Abstract :
Corrective maintenance activities (bug fixing) can be performed a long time after a bug introduction, or shortly after it. Such a time interval, i.e., the bug survival time, may depend on many factors, e.g., the bug severity/harmfulness, but also on how likely does the bug manifest itself and how difficult was to fix it. This paper proposes the use of survival analysis aimed at determining the relationship between the risk of not fixing a bug within a given time frame and specific source code constructs-e.g., expression operators or programming language constructs-changed when fixing the bug. We estimate the survival time by extracting, from versioning repositories, changes introducing and fixing bugs, and then correlate such a time-by means of survival models-with the constructs changed during bug-fixing. Results of a study performed on data extracted from the versioning repository of four open source projects-Eclipse, Mozilla, Open LDAP, and Vuze-indicate that long-lived bugs can be characterized by changes to specific code constructs.
Keywords :
program debugging; software maintenance; Eclipse; Mozilla; Open LDAP; Vuze-indicate; bug fixing; bug harmfulness; bug severity; bug survival analysis; corrective maintenance activities; data extraction; open source projects; programming language constructs; source code constructs; time frame; Computational modeling; Computer bugs; Hazards; Java; Parametric statistics; Synchronization; Bug Fixing; Empirical Study; Survival Analysis;
fLanguage :
English
Publisher :
ieee
Conference_Titel :
Reverse Engineering (WCRE), 2011 18th Working Conference on
Conference_Location :
Limerick
ISSN :
1095-1350
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4577-1948-6
Type :
conf
DOI :
10.1109/WCRE.2011.31
Filename :
6079842
Link To Document :
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