A conceptual replication study on bugs that get fixed in open source software

Abstract

Bugs dominate the corrective maintenance and evolutionary changes in large-scale software systems. The topic of bugs has been extensively investigated and reported in the literature. Unfortunately, the existential question of all "whether a reported bug will be fixed or not" has not received much attention. The paper presents an empirical study on four open source projects to examine the factors that influence the likelihood of a bug getting fixed or not. Overall, our study can be contextualized as a conceptual replication of a previous study on Microsoft systems from a commercial domain. The similarities and differences in terms of the design, execution, and results between the two studies are discussed. It was observed from these systems that the reputations of the reporter and assigned developer to fix it, and the number of comments on a bug have the most substantial impact on its probability to get fixed. Moreover, we formulated a predictive model from features available as soon as a bug is reported to estimate whether it will be fixed or not. Intra and inter (cross) project validations were performed. Precision and Recall metrics were used to assess the predictive model. Their values were recorded in the 60% to 70% range.