A Longitudinal Analysis of Bug Handling Across Eclipse Releases

Zeinab Abou Khalil (1, 2, 3) , Eleni Constantinou (3) , Tom Mens (3) , Laurence Duchien (1, 2) , Clément Quinton (1, 2)

1 Université de Lille
2 SPIRALS - Self-adaptation for distributed services and large software systems
3 UMONS - University of Mons [Belgium]

Large open source software projects, like Eclipse, follow a continuous software development process, with a regular release cycle. During each release, new bugs are reported, triaged and resolved. Previous studies have focused on various aspects of bug fixing, such as bug triaging, bug prediction, and bug process analysis. Most studies, however, do not distinguish between what happens before and after each scheduled release. We are also unaware of studies that compare bug fixing activities across different project releases. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the bug handling process of Eclipse over a 15-year period, considering 138K bug reports from Bugzilla, including 16 annual Eclipse releases and two quarterly releases in 2018. We compare the bug resolution rate, the fixing rate, the bug triaging time and the fixing time before and after each release date, and we study the possible impact of "release pressure". Among others, our results reveal that Eclipse bug handling activity is improving over time, with an important decrease in the number of reported bugs before releases, an increase in the bug fixing rate and an increasingly balanced bug handling workload before and after releases. The recent transition from an annual to a quarterly release cycle continued to improve the bug handling process.

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Zeinab Abou Khalil, Eleni Constantinou, Tom Mens, Laurence Duchien, Clément Quinton. A Longitudinal Analysis of Bug Handling Across Eclipse Releases. ICSME 2019 - 35th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Sep 2019, Cleveland, United States. ⟨hal-02179172⟩