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Assessing the quality of the steps to reproduce in bug reports

Published: 12 August 2019 Publication History

Abstract

A major problem with user-written bug reports, indicated by developers and documented by researchers, is the (lack of high) quality of the reported steps to reproduce the bugs. Low-quality steps to reproduce lead to excessive manual effort spent on bug triage and resolution. This paper proposes Euler, an approach that automatically identifies and assesses the quality of the steps to reproduce in a bug report, providing feedback to the reporters, which they can use to improve the bug report. The feedback provided by Euler was assessed by external evaluators and the results indicate that Euler correctly identified 98% of the existing steps to reproduce and 58% of the missing ones, while 73% of its quality annotations are correct.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ESEC/FSE 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 27th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
    August 2019
    1264 pages
    ISBN:9781450355728
    DOI:10.1145/3338906
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 12 August 2019

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    1. Bug Report Quality
    2. Dynamic Software Analysis
    3. Textual Analysis

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    • (2024)Mobile Bug Report Reproduction via Global Search on the App UI ModelProceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering10.1145/36608241:FSE(2656-2676)Online publication date: 12-Jul-2024
    • (2024)Early and Realistic Exploitability Prediction of Just-Disclosed Software Vulnerabilities: How Reliable Can It Be?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/365444333:6(1-41)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Feedback-Driven Automated Whole Bug Report Reproduction for Android AppsProceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis10.1145/3650212.3680341(1048-1060)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2024
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