CAREER: Enabling and Exploiting Evidence-Based Bug Triage

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

Evolving software is no simple task: somehow, amongst innumerable bug reports, feature requests, and project plans, software teams must decide which of issues deserve the team's limited time and resources. To make these decisions, most teams engage in bug triage, comparing subjective estimates of the frequency and severity of issues. This research seeks to replace these subjective estimates with large-scale data on software use. To achieve this, the research explores a tools that detect software issues through peoples' normal use of help tools. The use of these tools will capture a wide range of software issues in a consistent, structured form, enabling several forms of aggregation and analysis. Unlike voluntary feedback, these tools will be part of users' normal work, increasing the representativeness of frequency and severity estimates, while also capturing new kinds of issues such as non-fatal errors and a wide range of usability problems. Evaluation includes deployment to real software development teams and controlled experiments of the efficacy of the resulting tools. The broader impacts of the work are ultimately to enable software teams to evolve software in a way that best meets the needs of its users.