Candidate
Rafael Velly Lotufo
Title
Towards Next Generation Bug Tracking Systems
Supervisor
Czarnecki, Krzysztof
Abstract
Although bug tracking systems are fundamental to support virtually any software development process, they are currently suboptimal to support the needs and complexities of large communities.
This dissertation first presents empirical evidence, together with findings of related work, showing that the traditional interface used by virtually all bug tracking systems invites much noise into the ecosystem and, thus, impacts productivity, leaving contributors struggling to find relevant bug reports to work on and to make sense of the dumps of data put into bug reports. We find that noise comes from, not only low- quality contributions posted by inexperienced users or from conflicts that naturally arise in such ecosystem, but also from the difficulty of fitting the complex bug resolution process and knowledge into the linear sequence of comments that current bug tracking systems use to collect and organize information. After presenting the main issues contributing to reduce productivity in bug tracking systems, we present three orthogonal approaches to overcome these issues, by improving contribution quality and by improving data organization so that it better fits the complexity of collaborative bug resolution. To improve contribution quality in bug tracking systems, we present, through an empirical investigation of Stack Overflow and bug tracking systems, how game mechanisms could motivate contributors to post higher-quality contributions and create a healthy and active ecosystem for bug resolution. To improve data organization, we propose two complementary approaches, each of which is evaluated by bug tracking system users in open and closed sourced projects. The first is an automated approach to data organization, creating bug report summaries that make reading and working with bug reports easier, by highlighting the portions of bug reports that expert developers would focus on, if reading the bug report in a hurry. The second approach to improve data organization is a fundamental change on how data is collected and organized, that eliminates comments as the main component of bug reports, and shifts contributors' attention from conversational content to informational content about the two most important information types in bug reports: bug diagnosis and solutions. Finally, we present our view for how next generation bug tracking systems could combine the use of the three approaches such that they benefit from and build upon the results of the other approaches.