Interactive views for analyzing problem reports

Issue tracking repositories contain a wealth of information for reasoning about various aspects of software development processes. In this paper, we focus on bug triaging and provide visual means to explore the effort estimation quality and the bug life-cycle of reported problems. Our approach follows the Micro/Macro reading technique and uses a combination of graphical views to investigate details of individual problem reports while maintaining the context provided by the surrounding data population. This enables the detection and detailed analysis of hidden patterns and facilitates the analysis of problem report outliers. In an industrial study, we use our approach in various problem report analysis scenarios and answer questions related to effort estimation and resource planning.