Mining Severe Priority Bugs in Software Maintenance

Abstract

Maintenance of open source software is a hectic task as the number of bugs reported is huge. The number of projects, components and versions in an open source project also contribute to the number of bugs that are being reported. Classification of bugs based on priority and identification of the suitable engineers for assignment of bugs for such huge systems still remains a major challenge. Bugs that are misclassified or assigned to engineers who don’t have the component expertise, drastically affect the time taken towards bug resolution. In this paper we have explored the usage of data mining techniques on the classification of bugs and assignment of bugs to engineers.Our focus was on classifying bugs as either severe or non-severe and identification of engineers who have the right expertise to fix the bugs. The prediction of bug severity and identification of engineers were done by mining bug reports from JIRA, an open source software bug tracking tool. The mining process yielded positive results and will be a decision enhancer for severe bugs in the maintenance phase