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

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

An industrial study on the differences between pre-release and post-release bugs

Software bugs constitute a frequent and common issue of software development. To deal with this problem, modern software development methodologies introduce dedicated quality assurance procedures. At the same time researchers aim at developing techniques capable of supporting the early discovery and fix of bugs. One important factor that guides such research attempts is the characteristics of software bugs and bug fixes. In this paper, we present an industrial study on the characteristics and differences between pre-release bugs, i.e. bugs detected during software development, and post-release bugs, i.e. bugs that escaped to production. Understanding such differences is of paramount importance as it will improve our understanding on the testing and debugging support that practitioners require from the research community, on the validity of the assumptions of several research techniques, and, most importantly, on the reasons why bugs escape to production. To this end, we analyze 37 industrial projects from our industrial partner and document the differences between pre-release bugs and post-release bugs. Our findings suggest that post-release bugs are more complex to fix, requiring developers to modify several source code files, written in different programming languages, and configuration files, as well. We also find that approximately 82% of the post-release bugs involve code additions and can be characterized as "omission" bugs. Finally, we conclude the paper with a discussion on the implications of our study and provide guidance to future research directions