Debt-Prone Bugs: Technical Debt in Software Maintenance
This work addresses software maintenance challenges for developers by providing a method to predict bug-fixing time, though it is incremental as it builds on existing technical debt concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of technical debt in software maintenance by introducing the concept of debt-prone bugs, including tag, reopened, and duplicate bugs, and shows through a case study on Mozilla that identifying these bugs can help monitor and improve software quality.
Fixing bugs is an important phase in software development and maintenance. In practice, the process of bug fixing may conflict with the release schedule. Such confliction leads to a trade-off between software quality and release schedule, which is known as the technical debt metaphor. In this article, we propose the concept of debt-prone bugs to model the technical debt in software maintenance. We identify three types of debt-prone bugs, namely tag bugs, reopened bugs, and duplicate bugs. A case study on Mozilla is conducted to examine the impact of debt-prone bugs in software products. We investigate the correlation between debt-prone bugs and the product quality. For a product under development, we build prediction models based on historical products to predict the time cost of fixing bugs. The result shows that identifying debt-prone bugs can assist in monitoring and improving software quality.