title: "\"Not My Bug!\" and Other Reasons for Software Bug Report Reassignments"
authors: Philip J. Guo, Thomas Zimmermann, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy
venue: ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
year: 2011

tweet: People reassign software bugs to teammates since it can be hard to find the best person to fix them

abstract: >
  Bug reporting/fixing is an important social part of the software
  development process. The bug-fixing process inherently has strong
  inter-personal dynamics at play, especially in how to find the optimal
  person to handle a bug report. Bug report reassignments, which are a
  common part of the bug-fixing process, have rarely been studied.
  <br/><br/>
  In this paper, we present a large-scale quantitative and qualitative
  analysis of the bug reassignment process in the Microsoft Windows Vista
  operating system project. We quantify social interactions in terms of
  both useful and harmful reassignments. For instance, we found that
  reassignments are useful to determine the best person to fix a bug,
  contrary to the popular opinion that reassignments are always harmful.
  We categorized five primary reasons for reassignments: finding the root
  cause, determining ownership, poor bug report quality, hard to determine
  proper fix, and workload balancing. We then use these findings to make
  recommendations for the design of more socially-aware bug tracking
  systems that can overcome some of the inefficiencies we observed in our
  study.

bibtex: >
  @inproceedings{GuoCSCW2011,
   author = {Guo, Philip J. and Zimmermann, Thomas and Nagappan, Nachiappan and Murphy, Brendan},
   title = {{"Not My Bug!"} and Other Reasons for Software Bug Report Reassignments},
   booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work},
   series = {CSCW '11},
   year = {2011},
   isbn = {978-1-4503-0556-3},
   location = {Hangzhou, China},
   pages = {395--404},
   numpages = {10},
   url = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1958824.1958887},
   doi = {10.1145/1958824.1958887},
   acmid = {1958887},
   publisher = {ACM},
   address = {New York, NY, USA},
   keywords = {bug reassignment, bug tracking, bug triaging},
  }