Abstract
The dire consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic have influenced development of COVID-19 software i.e., software used for analysis and mitigation of COVID-19. Bugs in COVID-19 software can be consequential, as COVID-19 software projects can impact public health policy and user data privacy. The goal of this paper is to help practitioners and researchers improve the quality of COVID-19 software through an empirical study of open source software projects related to COVID-19. We use 129 open source COVID-19 software projects hosted on GitHub to conduct our empirical study. Next, we apply qualitative analysis on 550 bug reports from the collected projects to identify bug categories. We identify 8 bug categories, which include data bugs i.e., bugs that occur during mining and storage of COVID-19 data. The identified bug categories appear for 7 categories of software projects including (i) projects that use statistical modeling to perform predictions related to COVID-19, and (ii) medical equipment software that are used to design and implement medical equipment, such as ventilators. Based on our findings, we advocate for robust statistical model construction through better synergies between data science practitioners and public health experts. Existence of security bugs in user tracking software necessitates development of tools that will detect data privacy violations and security weaknesses.
Highlights
The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID19) is a world wide pandemic that spreads through droplets generated from coughs or sneezes and by touching contaminated sur faces (John Hopkins University, 2020)
We provide the differences that we have noticed between COVID19 software projects and other software projects, which we discuss in the following subsections: 5.3.1 Differences in Bug Manifestation
An understanding of COVID19 software categories and software bugs can give us clues on how the software engineering community can help even further in combating COVID19
Summary
The novel Coronavirus disease (COVID19) is a world wide pandemic that spreads through droplets generated from coughs or sneezes and by touching contaminated sur faces (John Hopkins University, 2020). As of May 31 2020, COVID19 has caused 370,247 deaths across the world (John Hopkins University, 2020). Apart from causing thousands of deaths and creating long term health repercussions for vul nerable populations, COVID19 has severely impacted the economic sector. According to a recent study (Erin Duffin, 2020), due to COVID19 gross domestic product (GDP) will decrease from 3.0% to 2.4% worldwide. As of May 28 2020, nearly 41 million citizens reported unemployment in USA alone (Mitchell Hartman, 2020). More than 3.9 billion peo ple around the world were under some form of stay at home order due to COVID19 (Alasdair Sandford, 2020)
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