Comparison of Seven Bug Report Types: A Case-Study of Google Chrome Browser Project

Bug reports submitted to an issue tracking system can belong to different categories such as crash, regression, security, cleanup, polish, performance and usability. A deeper understanding of the properties and features of various categories of bug reports can have implications in improving software maintenance processes, tools and practices. We identify several metrics and characteristics serving as dimensions on which various types of bug reports can be compared. We perform a case-study on Google Chromium Browser open-source project and conduct a series of experiments to calculate various metrics. We present a characterization study comparing different types of bug reports on metrics such as: statistics on close-time, number of stars, number of comments, discriminatory and frequent words for each class, entropy across reporters, entropy across component, opening and closing trend, continuity and debugging efficiency performance characteristics. The calculated metrics shows the similarities and differences on various dimensions for seven different types of bug reports.

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