Title: Using bug report as a software quality measure: an empirical study

Authors: Liguo Yu; Srini Ramaswamy

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Informatics, Indiana University South Bend, 1700 Mishawaka Avenue, South Bend, Indiana, 46634, USA ' Industrial Software Systems, ABB India Corporate Research Center, 1 Bhoruka Tech Park, Bangalore, 560048, India

Abstract: Bug reporting systems, such as Bugzilla are online tools used in software development and maintenance to store and track the status of a bug report. They are widely used by both open-source software projects and commercial software companies and have become a major source to study software evolution, software project management, and software quality control. In some research studies, the number of bug reports has been used as an indicator of software quality. This paper examines this representation. We investigate whether the number of bug reports of a specific version of a software product is correlated with its quality. Our study is performed on six branches of three open-source software systems. Our results do not support using the number of bug reports as a quality indicator of a specific version of an evolving software product. Instead, the study reveals that the number of bug reports is in some ways correlated with the time duration between product releases. Finally, the paper suggests a future research to study whether accumulated bug reports can be used as a means to represent the quality of a software branch.

Keywords: software quality; bug reports; quality measures; empirical study; software bugs; software product quality; open source software; OSS; software product releases.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIQ.2013.054280

International Journal of Information Quality, 2013 Vol.3 No.2, pp.164 - 183

Received: 02 Mar 2012
Accepted: 10 Sep 2012
Published online: 26 Jul 2014 *

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