Predicting Effort to Fix Software Bugs

Predicting the time and effort for a software problem has long been a difficult task. We present an approach that predicts the fixing effort for an issue. Our technique leverages existing issue tracking systems: given a new issue report, we search for similar, earlier reports and use their average time as a prediction. Our approach thus allows for early effort estimation, helping in assigning issues and scheduling stable releases. We evaluated our approach on the JBoss project data and found that we can estimate within ±7 hours of the actual effort. 1