title: "Characterizing and Predicting Which Bugs Get Fixed: An Empirical Study of Microsoft Windows"
authors: Philip J. Guo, Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy
venue: IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)
year: 2010
tweet: Software bugs reported by more respected and socially-proximal people are more likely to get fixed
abstract: >
We performed an empirical study to
characterize factors that affect which bugs get fixed in Windows Vista
and Windows 7, focusing on factors related to bug report edits and
relationships between people involved in handling the bug. We found that
bugs reported by people with better reputations were more likely to get
fixed, as were bugs handled by people on the same team and working in
geographical proximity. We reinforce these quantitative results with
survey feedback from 358 Microsoft employees who were involved in
Windows bugs. Survey respondents also mentioned additional qualitative
influences on bug fixing, such as the importance of seniority and
interpersonal skills of the bug reporter.
Informed by these
findings, we built a statistical model to predict the probability that a
new bug will be fixed (the first known one, to the best of our
knowledge). We trained it on Windows Vista bugs and got a precision of
68% and recall of 64% when predicting Windows 7 bug fixes. Engineers
could use such a model to prioritize bugs during triage, to estimate
developer workloads, and to decide which bugs should be closed or
migrated to future product versions.
bibtex: >
@inproceedings{GuoICSE2010,
author = {Guo, Philip J. and Zimmermann, Thomas and Nagappan, Nachiappan and Murphy, Brendan},
title = {Characterizing and Predicting Which Bugs Get Fixed: An Empirical Study of {Microsoft Windows}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1},
series = {ICSE '10},
year = {2010},
isbn = {978-1-60558-719-6},
location = {Cape Town, South Africa},
pages = {495--504},
numpages = {10},
url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1806799.1806871},
doi = {10.1145/1806799.1806871},
acmid = {1806871},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}