An Empirical Study of Dormant Bugs

Authors -

Tse, Hsun Chen; Meiyappan, Nagappan; Emad, Shihab and Ahmed, E. Hassan

Venue -

In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014), Hyderabad, India, May 31 - June 1, 2014

Related Tags -

• MSR
• Bugs
• Defect Prediction
• 2014

Abstract -

Over the past decade, several research efforts have studied the quality of software systems by looking at post-release bugs. However, these studies do not account for bugs that remain dormant (i.e., introduced in a version of the software system, but are not found until much later) for years and across many versions. Such dormant bugs skew our understanding of the software quality. In this paper we study dormant bugs against non-dormant bugs using data from 20 different open-source Apache foundation software systems. We find that 33% of the bugs introduced in a version are not reported till much later (i.e., they are reported in future versions as dormant bugs). Moreover, we find that 18.9% of the reported bugs in a version are not even introduced in that version (i.e., they are dormant bugs from prior versions). In short, the use of reported bugs to judge the quality of a specific version might be misleading. Exploring the fix process for dormant bugs, we find that they are fixed faster (median fix time of 5 days) than nondormant bugs (median fix time of 8 days), and are fixed by more experienced developers (median commit counts of developers who fix dormant bug is 169% higher). Our results highlight that dormant bugs are different from non-dormant bugs in many perspectives and that future research in software quality should carefully study and consider dormant bugs.

Preprint -

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BibTex -

@article{Chen2014,
 author = {Tse,Hsun Chen and Meiyappan, Nagappan and Emad, Shihab and Ahmed, E. Hassan},
 keyword = {Bugs, Defect Prediction},
 title = {An Empirical Study of Dormant Bugs},
 type = {conference},
 venue = {In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2014), Hyderabad, India, May 31 - June 1, 2014}
}