Locating Bug IDs and Development Logs in Open Source Software (OSS) projects: An Experience Report

Abstract

The development logs of software projects, contained in Version Control (VC) systems can be severely incomplete when tracking bugs, especially in open source projects, resulting in a reduced traceability of defects. Other times, such logs can contain bug information that is not available in bug tracking system (BT system) repositories, and vice-versa: if development logs and BT system data were used together, researchers and practitioners often would have a larger set of bug IDs for a software project, and a better picture of a bug life cycle, its evolution and maintenance. Considering a sample of 10 OSS projects and their development logs and BT systems data, the two objectives of this paper are (i) to determine which of the keywords 'Fix', 'Bug' or the '#' identifier provide the better precision; and (ii) to analyse their respective precision and recall at locating the larger amount possible of bug IDs manually. Overall, our results suggest that the use of the '#' identifier in conjunction with the bug ID digits (e.g., #1234) is more precise for locating bugs in development logs, than the use of the 'Bug' and 'Fix' keywords. Such keywords are indeed present in the development logs, but they are less useful when trying to connect the development actions with the bug traces in software project.