Mastersthesis,
BAST: A Bug Report Analysis and Search Tool
Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife, Pernambuco, Brazil, (2009)
Abstract
Software maintenance and evolution are characterised by their huge
cost and slow speed of implementation. Yet they are inevitable activities
-- almost all software that is useful and successful stimulates user-generated
requests for change and improvements. Sommerville2007
is even more emphatic and says that software changes is a fact of
life for large software systems. In addition, a set of studies has
stated along the years that software maintenance and evolution is
the most expensive phase of software development, taking up to 90\%
of the total costs.
All those characteristics from software maintenance lead the academia
and industry to constantly investigate new solutions to reduce costs
in such phase. In this context, Software Configuration Management
(SCM) is a set of activities and standards for managing and evolving
software; SCM defines how to record and process proposed system changes,
how to relate these to system components, among other procedures.
For all these tasks it has been proposed different tools, such as
version control systems and bug trackers. However, some issues may
arise due to these tools usage, such as the dynamic assignment of
a developer to a bug report or the bug report duplication problem.
In this sense, this dissertation investigates the problem of bug report
duplication emerged by the use of bug trackers on software development
projects. The problem of bug report duplication is characterized
by the submission of two or more bug reports that describe the same
software issue, and the main consequence of this problem is the overhead
of rework when managing these bug reports.
