缺陷报告质量研究综述

Survey of Research on Bug Report Quality

在软件开发和维护过程中,缺陷修复人员通常根据由终端用户或者开发/测试者提交的缺陷报告来定位和修复缺陷.因此,缺陷报告本身的质量对修复人员能否快速准确定位并修复缺陷具有重要的作用.围绕缺陷报告质量的刻画及改进,研究人员开展了大量的研究工作,但尚未进行系统性的归纳.旨在对这些工作进行系统性地梳理,展示该领域的研究现状并为未来的研究方向提供参考意见.首先,总结了已有缺陷报告存在的质量问题,如关键信息缺失、信息错误等;接着,总结了对缺陷报告质量进行自动化建模的技术;然后,描述了一系列对缺陷报告质量进行改进的方法;最后,对未来研究可能面临的挑战和机遇进行了展望.

During the software development and maintenance process,bug fixers usually refer to bug reports submitted by end-users or developers/testers to locate and fix a bug.In this sense,the quality of the bug report largely determines whether the bug fixer could quickly and precisely locate the bug and further fix it.Researchers have done much work on characterizing,modeling,and improving the quality of bug reports.This study offers a systematic survey on existing work on bug report quality,with an attempt to understand the current state of research on this area as well as to open new avenues for future research work.Firstly,quality problems of bug reports reported by existing studies are summarized into a list,such as the missing of key information and errors in information items.Then,a series of work on automatically modeling bug report quality are presented.After that,those approaches are introduced that aim to improve bug report quality.Finally,the challenges and potential opportunities for research on bug report quality are discussed.