An Empirical Study of Bug Fixing Rate

Bug fixing is one of the most important activities in software development and maintenance. A software project often employs an issue tracking system such as Bugzilla to store and manage their bugs. In the issue tracking system, many bugs are invalid but take unnecessary efforts to identify them. In this paper, we mainly focus on bug fixing rate, i.e., The proportion of the fixed bugs in the reported closed bugs. In particular, we study the characteristics of bug fixing rate and investigate the impact of a reporter's different contribution behaviors to the bug fixing rate. We perform an empirical study on all reported bugs of two large open source software communities Eclipse and Mozilla. We find (1) the bug fixing rates of both projects are not high, (2) there exhibits a negative correlation between a reporter's bug fixing rate and the average time cost to close the bugs he/she reports, (3) the amount of bugs a reporter ever fixed has a strong positive impact on his/her bug fixing rate, (4) reporters' bug fixing rates have no big difference, whether their contribution behaviors concentrate on a few products or across many products, (5) reporters' bug fixing rates tend to increase as time goes on, i.e., Developers become more experienced at reporting bugs.