Performance Assessment of Bug Fixing Process in Open Source Repositories

Software bugs are inevitable. Large software projects often use bug tracking systems in order to collect, organize and keep track of reported bugs. The primary objective of using these bug tracking systems is to expedite the bug fix process which further improves the overall quality of software product. However, managing bug tracking systems incurs additional cost and efforts. Hence, it is important to monitor the performance of the bug fix process which is followed in bug tracking systems. The aim of this paper is to identify the performance characteristics of the bug fixing process in open source bug repositories. Various performance metrics have been investigated which measures the bug fix process quality. For experimental evaluation, bug reports are collected from Bugzilla repository of Mozilla Firefox, Eclipse, NetBeans and Open Office projects. It has been found that overall 45.67% of bug reports are closed with fixed resolution. Rest 54.33% bug reports keep lying in bug repository unresolved thereby creating an extra backlog of work for software developers. Further, the root causes have been determined which keeps these large portions of bug reports lying in bug repositories opened and found that Non-Reproducible bugs are the most deteriorating factor in bug fix process and affects the fix process performance negatively.