Do Rapid Releases Affect Bug Reopening? A Case Study of Firefox

Abstract

Large software organizations have been adopting rapid release cycles to deliver features and bug fixes earlier to their users. Because this approach reduces time for testing, it raises concerns about the effectiveness of quality assurance in this setting. In this paper, we study how the adoption of rapid release cycles impacts bug reopening rate, an indicator for the quality of the bug fixing process. To this end, we analyze thousands of bug reports from Mozilla Firefox, both before and after their adoption of rapid releases. Results suggest that the bug reopening rate of versions developed in rapid cycles was about 7% higher. Also, as a warning to the software analytics community, we report contradictory results from three attempts to answer our research question, performed with varying degrees of knowledge about the Firefox release process.