A first look at bug report templates on GitHub

Abstract

Bug reports which are written by different people have a variety of styles, and such various styles lead to difficulty in understanding bug reports. To enhance the comprehensibility of bug reports, GitHub has proposed a template mechanism to guide how to report the bugs. However, there is no study on the use of bug report templates on GitHub. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study on the bug report templates on GitHub, including the popularity, benefits, and content of the templates. Our empirical study finds that: (1) For popularity, more and more open source projects and bug reports are applying templates over time. (2) For benefits, bug reports written using templates will be resolved quicker and have a higher comment coverage. (3) For content, the most common items for templates are expected behavior, describe the bug and to reproduce etc. Additionally, we summarize a taxonomy of items for bug report templates. Finally, we propose an automatic templating approach for templating an un-templated bug report. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 0.718 and an F1-score of 0.717 on average, which shows that our approach can effectively templatize an un-templated bug report.