Stage-oriented Analysis on Factors Impacting Bug Fixing Time

The timely fixing of bugs is important to ensure software quality. In Open Source Software (OSS) development, behaviors of stakeholders impact the bug fixing process, especially the different stages respectively. However, most of the existing studies on impact factors of bug fixing time usually treat bug fixing process as a whole, while neglecting the particularity at its different stages. Ignoring the detail of different stages cannot let us understand why the fixing time is longer or shorter. In this paper, we aimed at investigating whether the factors have different impacts on the time of different stages and the whole process. Three stages of the whole fixing process were formalized, and twenty-four factors were defined and extracted from three aspects: bug reports, their associated source code and code changes. An empirical study based on two OSS projects, Eclipse JDT Core and Linux Kernel, was conducted for the investigation. The results of our study provide a very positive validation that the influence of factors on bug fixing time is stage related, rather than for the whole process. Our results can help developers better understand influences of factors on the bug fixing process, and thus provide opportunities to improve their process effectively. Keywords-OSS maintenance; bug fixing time; stage-oriented analysis; empirical study