Wayback Machine: A tool to capture the evolutionary behavior of the bug reports and their triage process in open-source software systems

Abstract

The issue tracking system (ITS) is a rich data source for data-driven decision-making. Different characteristics of bugs, such as severity, priority, and time to fix, provide a clear picture of an ITS. Nevertheless, such information may be misleading. For example, the exact time and the effort spent on a bug might be significantly different from the actual reporting time and the fixing time. Similarly, these values may be subjective, e.g., severity and priority values are assigned based on the intuition of a user or a developer rather than a structured and well-defined procedure. Hence, we explore the evolution of the bug dependency graph together with priority and severity levels to explore the actual triage process. Inspired by the idea of the “Wayback Machine” for the World Wide Web, we aim to reconstruct the historical decisions made in the ITS. Therefore, any bug prioritization or bug triage algorithms/scenarios can be applied in the same environment using our proposed ITS Wayback Machine. More importantly, we track the evolutionary metrics in the ITS when a custom triage/prioritization strategy is employed. We test the efficiency of the proposed algorithm using data extracted from three open-source projects. Our empirical study sheds light on the overlooked evolutionary metrics – e.g., overdue bugs and developers’ loads – which are facilitated via our proposed past-event re-generator.