One Step More to Understand the Bug Report Duplication Problem

Abstract

According to recent work, duplicate bug reports impact negatively on software maintenance and evolution productivity due to, among other factors, the increased time spent on report analysis and validation. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost mainly with duplicate bug report analysis. In this sense, this work presents am exploratory study using data from bug trackers from private and open source projects, in order to understand the possible factors (i.e. software life-time, size, amount of bug reports, etc.) that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development. This work also discusses bug report characteristics that could help identifying duplicates.