Estimating the Time to Fix Bugs Using Bug Reports

Kimun Kwon, Kwanghue Jin, Byungjeong Lee

http://doi.org/

As fixing bugs is a large part of software development and maintenance, estimating the time to fix bugs -bug fixing time- is extremely useful when planning software projects. Therefore, in this study, we propose a way to estimate bug fixing time using bug reports. First, we classify previous bug reports with meta fields by applying a k-NN method. Next, we compute the similarity of the new bug and previous bugs by using data from bug reports. Finally, we estimate how long it will take to fix the new bug using the time it took to repair similar bugs. In this study, we perform experiments with open source software. The results of these experiments show that our approach effectively estimates the bug fixing time.