The symptoms, causes, and repairs of workarounds in apache issue trackers

ABSTRACTIn issue tracker systems, a bug report can be resolved as workaround. Since the definition of workarounds is vague, many research questions on workarounds are still open. For example, what are the symptoms of bugs which are resolved as workarounds? Why does a bug report have to be resolved as workarounds? What are the repairs and impacts of workarounds? In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to explore the above research questions. In particular, we analyzed 221 real workarounds that were collected from 88 Apache projects. Our results lead to ten findings and our answers to all the above questions. Our findings are useful to understand workarounds and to improve software projects and issue trackers.