Quality of bug reports in Eclipse

Abstract

The information in bug reports influences the speed at which bugs are fixed. However, bug reports differ in their quality of information. We conducted a survey among ECLIPSE developers to determine the information in reports that they widely used and the problems frequently encountered. Our results show that steps to reproduce and stack traces are most sought after by developers, while inaccurate steps to reproduce and incomplete information pose the largest hurdles. Surprisingly, developers are indifferent to bug duplicates. Such insight is useful to design new bug tracking tools that guide reporters at providing more helpful information. We also present a prototype of a quality-meter tool that measures the quality of bug reports by scanning its content.