"What makes a good bug report?"

"What makes a good bug report?"

1. Intro

   • What is a bug report: Bug reports typically contain a detailed description of a failure and occasionally hint at the location of the fault in the code (in form of patches or stack traces). They allow users to inform developers of the problems encountered while using a software.

2. Purpose

   • To investigate the quality of bug reports from the perspective of developers.
     • Factors that may affect quality:
       • Length of descriptions, formatting, and presence of stack traces and attachments (such as screenshots).
     • Asked 872 developers from the APACHE, ECLIPSE, and MOZILLA projects to: complete a survey on important information in bug reports and the problems they faced with them and rate the quality of bug reports from very poor to very good on a five-point Likert scale.

3. Conclusion: there is a mismatch between what developers consider most helpful and what users provide.

   • To enable swift fixing of bugs, this mismatch should be bridged, for example with tool support for reporters to furnish information that developers want.

4. Survey:

   • Which items have developers previously used when fixing bugs? Which three items helped the most?
   • Which problems have developers encountered when fixing bugs? Which three problems caused most delay in fixing bugs?
   • Which items have reporters previously provided? Which three items were most difficult to provide?
   • Which three items do reporters consider to be most relevant for developers?
   • Survey results:
     • “The biggest causes of delay are not wrong information, but absent information."
     • “Duplicates are not really problems. They often add useful information. That this information were filed under a new report is not ideal thought.”