Evaluating Bug Severity Using Crowd-based Knowledge: An Exploratory Study

Abstract

In bug tracking system, the high volume of incoming bug reports poses a serious challenge to project managers. Triaging these bug reports manually consumes time and resources which leads to delaying the resolution of important bugs. StackOverflow is the most popular crowdsourcing Q&A community with plenty of bug-related posts. In this paper, we explore the correlation between bug severity and the crowd attributes of linked posts. Two typical types of projects' bug repositories are studied here, e.g. Mozilla (user-centric project) and Eclipse (developer-centric project). Our results show that the bug severity is consistent with the crowd-based knowledge both in Mozilla and Eclipse, i.e. the linked posts of severe bugs have higher score etc. in StackOverflow than non-severe bugs. This interesting phenomenon inspires us that we can optimize the existing evaluation methods of bug severity by incorporating the crowd-based knowledge from a third-party in future.