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Information needs in bug reports: improving cooperation between developers and users

Published: 06 February 2010 Publication History

Abstract

For many software projects, bug tracking systems play a central role in supporting collaboration between the developers and the users of the software. To better understand this collaboration and how tool support can be improved, we have quantitatively and qualitatively analysed the questions asked in a sample of 600 bug reports from the MOZILLA and ECLIPSE projects. We categorised the questions and analysed response rates and times by category and project. Our results show that the role of users goes beyond simply reporting bugs: their active and ongoing participation is important for making progress on the bugs they report. Based on the results, we suggest four ways in which bug tracking systems can be improved.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '10: Proceedings of the 2010 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
February 2010
468 pages
ISBN:9781605587950
DOI:10.1145/1718918
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 06 February 2010

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Author Tags

  1. bug reports
  2. information needs
  3. question time
  4. questions
  5. response rate
  6. response time

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CSCW '10
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CSCW '10: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
February 6 - 10, 2010
Georgia, Savannah, USA

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  • (2024)Two-Level Information-Retrieval-Based Model for Bug Localization Based on Bug ReportsElectronics10.3390/electronics1302032113:2(321)Online publication date: 11-Jan-2024
  • (2024)Inside Bug Report Templates: An Empirical Study on Bug Report Templates in Open-Source SoftwareProceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware10.1145/3671016.3671401(125-134)Online publication date: 24-Jul-2024
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