A Longitudinal Analysis of Bug Handling Across Eclipse Releases

International audienceLarge open source software projects, like Eclipse, follow a continuous software development process, with a regular release cycle. During each release, new bugs are reported, triaged and resolved. Previous studies have focused on various aspects of bug fixing, such as bug triaging, bug prediction, and bug process analysis. Most studies, however, do not distinguish between what happens before and after each scheduled release. We are also unaware of studies that compare bug fixing activities across different project releases. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the bug handling process of Eclipse over a 15-year period, considering 138K bug reports from Bugzilla, including 16 annual Eclipse releases and two quarterly releases in 2018. We compare the bug resolution rate, the fixing rate, the bug triaging time and the fixing time before and after each release date, and we study the possible impact of "release pressure". Among others, our results reveal that Eclipse bug handling activity is improving over time, with an important decrease in the number of reported bugs before releases, an increase in the bug fixing rate and an increasingly balanced bug handling workload before and after releases. The recent transition from an annual to a quarterly release cycle continued to improve the bug handling process

On the impact of release policies on bug handling activity: A case study of Eclipse

International audienceLarge software projects follow a continuous development process with regular releases during which bugs are handled. In recent years, many software projects shifted to rapid releases that reduce time-to-market and claim a faster delivery of fixed issues, but also have a shorter period to address bugs. To better understand the impact of rapid releases on bug handling activity, we empirically analyse successive releases of the Eclipse Core projects, focusing on the bug handling rates and durations as well as the feature freeze period. We study the impact of Eclipse's transition from a yearly to quarterly release cycle. We confirm our findings through feedback received from five Eclipse Core maintainers. Among others, our results reveal that Eclipse's bug handling process is becoming more stable over time, with a decreasing number of reported bugs before releases, an increasing bug fixing rate and an increasingly balanced bug handling workload before and after releases. The transition to a quarterly release cycle continued to improve bug handling. In addition, more effort is spent on bug fixing during the feature freeze period, while the bug handling rates do not differ between both periods

Studying the Impact of Policy Changes on Bug Handling Performance

International audienceThe majority of the software development effort is spent on software maintenance. Bug handling constitutes one of the major software maintenance activities. Earlier studies have empirically investigated various aspects of bug handling, such as bug triaging, bug fixing, and bug process analysis. However, results from previous studies may not be applicable to contemporary agile software development practices. Moreover, these studies did not investigate how changes in the development policies and supporting tools impact the bug handling process. Therefore, our main goal is to investigate the impact of such changes on the bug handling process performance. To do so, we are conducting empirical studies on large and long-lived open source software projects. We report on our current research findings and outline the ongoing Ph.D. research project of the first author

Software defect prediction using maximal information coefficient and fast correlation-based filter feature selection

Software quality ensures that applications that are developed are failure free. Some modern systems are intricate, due to the complexity of their information processes. Software fault prediction is an important quality assurance activity, since it is a mechanism that correctly predicts the defect proneness of modules and classifies modules that saves resources, time and developers’ efforts. In this study, a model that selects relevant features that can be used in defect prediction was proposed. The literature was reviewed and it revealed that process metrics are better predictors of defects in version systems and are based on historic source code over time. These metrics are extracted from the source-code module and include, for example, the number of additions and deletions from the source code, the number of distinct committers and the number of modified lines. In this research, defect prediction was conducted using open source software (OSS) of software product line(s) (SPL), hence process metrics were chosen. Data sets that are used in defect prediction may contain non-significant and redundant attributes that may affect the accuracy of machine-learning algorithms. In order to improve the prediction accuracy of classification models, features that are significant in the defect prediction process are utilised. In machine learning, feature selection techniques are applied in the identification of the relevant data. Feature selection is a pre-processing step that helps to reduce the dimensionality of data in machine learning. Feature selection techniques include information theoretic methods that are based on the entropy concept. This study experimented the efficiency of the feature selection techniques. It was realised that software defect prediction using significant attributes improves the prediction accuracy. A novel MICFastCR model, which is based on the Maximal Information Coefficient (MIC) was developed to select significant attributes and Fast Correlation Based Filter (FCBF) to eliminate redundant attributes. Machine learning algorithms were then run to predict software defects. The MICFastCR achieved the highest prediction accuracy as reported by various performance measures.School of ComputingPh. D. (Computer Science

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Improving software engineering processes using machine learning and data mining techniques

The availability of large amounts of data from software development has created an area of research called mining software repositories. Researchers mine data from software repositories both to improve understanding of software development and evolution, and to empirically validate novel ideas and techniques. The large amount of data collected from software processes can then be leveraged for machine learning applications. Indeed, machine learning can have a large impact in software engineering, just like it has had in other fields, supporting developers, and other actors involved in the software development process, in automating or improving parts of their work. The automation can not only make some phases of the development process less tedious or cheaper, but also more efficient and less prone to errors. Moreover, employing machine learning can reduce the complexity of difficult problems, enabling engineers to focus on more interesting problems rather than the basics of development. The aim of this dissertation is to show how the development and the use of machine learning and data mining techniques can support several software engineering phases, ranging from crash handling, to code review, to patch uplifting, to software ecosystem management. To validate our thesis we conducted several studies tackling different problems in an industrial open-source context, focusing on the case of Mozilla