An Initial Study on the Bug Report Duplication Problem

Abstract

According to recent work, duplicate bug report entries in bug tracking systems impact negatively on software maintenance and evolution productivity due to, among other factors, the increased time spent on report analysis and validation, what in some cases take over 20 minutes. Therefore, a considerable amount of time is lost mainly with duplicate bug report analysis. This work presents an initial characterization study using data from bug trackers from private and open source projects, in order to understand the possible factors that cause bug report duplication and its impact on software development.