A Study of Bug Management Using the Stack Exchange Question and Answering Platform

Abstract

Traditional bug management systems, like Bugzilla, are widely used in open source and commercial projects. Stack Exchange uses its online question and answer (Q&A) platform to collect and manage bugs, which brings several new unique features that are not offered in traditional bug management systems. Users can edit bug reports, use different communication channels, and vote on bug reports, answers, and their associated comments. Understanding how these features manage bug reports can provide insights to the designers of traditional bug management systems, like whether a feature should be introduced? and how would users leverage such a feature? We performed a large-scale analysis of 19,151 bug reports of the bug management system of Stack Exchange and studied the in-place editing, the answering and commenting, and the voting features. We find that: 1) The three features are used actively. 2) 57 percent of the edits improved the quality of bug reports. 3) Commenting provides a channel for discussing bug-related information, while answering offers a channel for explaining the causes of a bug and bug-fix information. 4) Downvotes are made due to the disagreement of the reported “bug” being a real bug and the low quality of bug reports. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions for traditional bug management systems.