How practitioners perceive automated bug report management techniques

• Main Authors: ZOU, Weiqin, LO, David, CHEN, Zhenyu, XIA, Xin, FENG, Yang, XU, Baowen
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: Bug Report; Developer Perception; Computer bugs; Maintenance engineering; Software; Interviews; Software engineering; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4353; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/5356/viewcontent/Perceive_Automated_Bug_Report_tse_2018_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Bug reports play an important role in the process of debugging and fixing bugs. To reduce the burden of bug report managers and facilitate the process of bug fixing, a great amount of software engineering research has been invested into automated bug report management techniques. However, the verdict is still open whether such techniques are actually required and applicable outside of the theoretical research domain. To fill this gap, in this paper, we conducted a survey among 327 practitioners to gain their insights into various categories of automated bug report management techniques. Specifically, in the survey, we asked them to rate the importance of such techniques and provide the rationales of their ratings. To get deeper insight into practitioners' perspective, we conducted follow-up interviews with 25 interviewees selected from the survey respondents. Through the survey and the interviews, we gained a better understanding of the perceived usefulness (or its lack) of different categories of automated bug report management techniques. Based on the survey and interview results, we summarized some potential research directions in developing techniques to help developers better manage bug reports.