An Empirical Study on Interaction Factors Influencing Bug Reopenings

Bugs can be reopened after they have been closed due to identification of the actual cause, previous incorrect fixing, or better reproducing, etc. Reopened bugs may increase the cost in maintenance, degrade the overall quality of the software product, reduce the trust of users, and bring unnecessary work to the already-busy developers. To minimize the occurrence of bug reopenings, the potential causes and factors should be analyzed. In this paper, we explore 24 interaction factors to study their influence on bug reopenings. The data are extracted from Mylyn logs of four open-source projects. We first verify the negative impacts of bug reopenings. Then, we identify 17 factors that significantly influence the likelihood of bug reopenings using statistic tests. In addition, we build decision trees using interaction factors to predict bug reopenings and achieve good performance.