Filling the gaps of development logs and bug issue data

Abstract

It has been suggested that the data from bug repositories is not always in sync or complete compared to the logs detailing the actions of developers on source code. In this paper, we trace two sources of information relative to software bugs: the change logs of the actions of developers and the issues reported as bugs. The aim is to identify and quantify the discrepancies between the two sources in recording and storing the developer logs relative to bugs. Focussing on the databases produced by two mining software repository tools, CVSAnalY and Bicho, we use part of the SZZ algorithm to identify bugs and to compare how the"defects-fixing changes" are recorded in the two databases. We use a working example to show how to do so. The results indicate that there is a significant amount of information, not in sync when tracing bugs in the two databases. We, therefore, propose an automatic approach to re-align the two databases, so that the collected information is mirrored and in sync.