Bug Report Quality Evaluation Considering the Effect of Submitter Reputation

The quality of a bug report is a very crucial aspect that influences the entire software life cycle. Generally, in many software projects relevant lack of information can be observed when submitting a bug report. Consequently, the time resolution of a software problem is strongly influenced by the quality of the reporting. In this paper, we investigate the quality of bug reports from the perspective of developers. We examined several metrics impacting the quality of bug reports, such as the length of descriptions, presence of stack traces, presence of attachments, completeness, and readability. In addition different definition of submitter reputation are compared and used. Then, a quality model is built for the evaluation of the quality of the bug reports, and a software tool has been implemented for supporting the application of the proposed model. The validation has been conducted on real cases of bug reports from open source software.