TY - GEN
T1 - Inside Bug Report Templates
T2 - 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, Internetware 2024
AU - Zhang, Junwei
AU - Liu, Zhongxin
AU - Bao, Lingfeng
AU - Xing, Zhenchang
AU - Hu, Xing
AU - Xia, Xin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2024 ACM.
PY - 2024/7/24
Y1 - 2024/7/24
N2 - In open-source software development, bug report templates (BRTs) have emerged as a crucial tool for ensuring the quality of bug reports. Despite their widespread use, developers have little knowledge about designing personalized BRTs. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the usage, effects, and design guidelines of BRTs. To this end, we conduct the first and most detailed study of BRTs on GitHub by performing quantitative and qualitative analyses in 3,194 projects and 5,987 commit messages of BRTs. We find that BRTs are widely used by open-source projects, especially prevalent in platform-type projects. Adopting BRTs can reduce the average number of comments and increase the likelihood of bug reports being addressed. Additionally, they may help developers identify duplicate reports and bug reports with missing description elements. We also classify the change history of existing BRTs and propose 14 design guidelines for BRTs. We survey 20 developers and 19 reporters on GitHub to investigate practitioners' perceptions of BRTs. The majority of respondents acknowledge the importance of BRTs. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions and provide actionable suggestions for practitioners.
AB - In open-source software development, bug report templates (BRTs) have emerged as a crucial tool for ensuring the quality of bug reports. Despite their widespread use, developers have little knowledge about designing personalized BRTs. Therefore, it is necessary to understand the usage, effects, and design guidelines of BRTs. To this end, we conduct the first and most detailed study of BRTs on GitHub by performing quantitative and qualitative analyses in 3,194 projects and 5,987 commit messages of BRTs. We find that BRTs are widely used by open-source projects, especially prevalent in platform-type projects. Adopting BRTs can reduce the average number of comments and increase the likelihood of bug reports being addressed. Additionally, they may help developers identify duplicate reports and bug reports with missing description elements. We also classify the change history of existing BRTs and propose 14 design guidelines for BRTs. We survey 20 developers and 19 reporters on GitHub to investigate practitioners' perceptions of BRTs. The majority of respondents acknowledge the importance of BRTs. Based on our findings, we highlight future research directions and provide actionable suggestions for practitioners.
KW - Bug Report Template
KW - Empirical Study
KW - Open Source Software
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85200915302&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3671016.3671401
DO - 10.1145/3671016.3671401
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85200915302
T3 - ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
SP - 125
EP - 134
BT - 15th Asia-Pacific Symposium on Internetware, Internetware 2024 - Proceedings
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Y2 - 24 July 2024 through 26 July 2024
ER -