On Incomplete Bug Fixes in Eclipse and Programmers' Intuition on These
Decanato - Facoltà di scienze informatiche
Data d'inizio: 2 Ottobre 2012
Data di fine: 3 Ottobre 2012
The Faculty of Informatics is pleased to announce a seminar given by Yossi Gil
DATE: Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012
PLACE: USI Università della Svizzera italiana, room SI-008, Informatics building (Via G. Buffi 13)
TIME: 15.30
ABSTRACT:
Recent studies indicate that multiple patches to software are found in a hefty portion of resolved bugs. It is also known that bugs that require multiple patches take longer to resolve, that their severity tends to be higher than the average and that they induce programmers to engage more in bug discussions.
This work is concerned with the ability of programmers to predict a bug will be of this sort, and in particular that it may require future patches and greater refixing effort at the time the bug is fixed at the first time.
A mathematical model is developed for a retrospective analysis of bugs maintenance history. In this model we compute the impact of an array of bug properties on the likelihood that a specific bug is chosen, among all open bugs, to receive its first fix. The studies we conduct on a sizable portion of the history of the Eclipse code base indicate that programmers tend to attend first to bugs which are easier to fix. The results further suggest that some of the criteria that programmers apply (probably unknowingly) to determine whether a bug is easy to fix, is the number of future patches it would require, and the amount of work involved in these patches. This is despite the fact that this information is not supposed to be available to the programmers at the time the first fix is made.
It is anticipated that the method of analysis introduced in this work would have other applications in software engineering, but also outside of computer science.
BIO:
Joseph (Yossi) Gil is the head of the software and the systems laboratory at the department of computer science at the Technion---Israel institute of Technology. His research interests shifted over the years from theoretical computer science to programming languages.
HOST: Prof. Matthias Hauswirth
