The Eclipse and Mozilla defect tracking dataset: A genuine dataset for mining bug information

Abstract

The analysis of bug reports is an important subfield within the mining software repositories community. It explores the rich data available in defect tracking systems to uncover interesting and actionable information about the bug triaging process. While bug data is readily accessible from systems like Bugzilla and JIRA, a common database schema and a curated dataset could significantly enhance future research because it allows for easier replication. Consequently, in this paper we propose the Eclipse and Mozilla Defect Tracking Dataset, a representative database of bug data, filtered to contain only genuine defects (i.e., no feature requests) and designed to cover the whole bug-triage life cycle (i.e., store all intermediate actions). We have used this dataset ourselves for predicting bug severity, for studying bug-fixing time and for identifying erroneously assigned components. Sharing these data with the rest of the community will allow for reproducibility, validation and comparison of the results obtained in bug-report analyses and experiments.