Duplicate bug reports considered harmful … really?

TLDR

The paper proposes merging duplicate bug reports instead of treating them separately and examines why users submit duplicates. The authors quantify the additional information provided by merged duplicates and demonstrate that automatic triaging can be improved. Survey results reveal that most developers encounter duplicate reports but rarely view them as serious, yet the extra information from duplicates speeds bug resolution and enhances triage.

Abstract

In a survey we found that most developers have experienced duplicated bug reports, however, only few considered them as a serious problem. This contradicts popular wisdom that considers bug duplicates as a serious problem for open source projects. In the survey, developers also pointed out that the additional information provided by duplicates helps to resolve bugs quicker. In this paper, we therefore propose to merge bug duplicates, rather than treating them separately. We quantify the amount of information that is added for developers and show that automatic triaging can be improved as well. In addition, we discuss the different reasons why users submit duplicate bug reports in the first place.