Debt-prone bugs: Technical debt in software maintenance

作者：Xuan Jifeng; Hu Yan; He Jiang^*

来源：International Journal of Advancements in Computing Technology, 2012, 4(19): 453-461.

DOI：10.4156/ijact.vol4.issue 19.54

• Bug-fixing
• Mozilla
• Open Source Software
• Prediction model
• Product quality
• Software products
• Software Quality
• Technical Debt
• Time cost

Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs, reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We investigate the correlation between debt-prone bugs and the product quality. For a product under development, we build prediction models based on historical products to predict the time cost of fixing bugs. The result shows that identifying debt-prone bugs can assist in monitoring and improving software quality.

• 出版日期2012