How much time did it take to notify a bug?: two case studies: elasticsearch and nova

Abstract

The Time To Notify (TTN) a bug is a valuable metric in the software maintenance and evolution studies that describes how much time it takes for a bug to be notified/reported in the issue tracking system since the time the bug was introduced into the source code. Even so, it is still a challenge to exactly calculate it since no precise way exists to locate where and when the bug originated. This paper aims to study what is the value of TTN in two different projects. For a set of bugs in these projects, we know exactly which previous commit was the cause of the failure in the system. Furthermore, to better understand how this is related to the maintenance and evolution of a software, we also analyze the relationship between TTN and other metrics extracted from the source code management (SCM) system such as the author of the bug, the Time To Fix (TTF) or the developer experience. We have observed that the mean of the TTN in the projects was 312 days and 431 days. However, only one of the projects showed a moderate correlation between the experience of the author who created the bug and TTN.