How should we read and analyze bug reports: an interactive visualization using extractive summaries and topic evolution
Shamima Yeasmin, Chanchal Kumar Roy, Kevin A. Schneider · Computer Science and Software Engineering · 2015
Software projects evolve over time as bugs are addressed and new functionalities are added. Managing bugs can be a significant challenge for a project manager especially when the number of reported bugs is large, and the manager needs to consult with them. It is also preferable that developers new to a project first familiarize themselves with the project and the reported bugs before actually working on them. In order to reduce developers' time and efforts for reading a bug report, in this paper, we propose a visualization technique that provides an extractive summary visualization for a given bug report. In addition, our proposed technique assists the developers or managers in reviewing a project's bug reports by interactively visualizing insightful information using topic analysis on the bug reports. In order to validate the effectiveness of our proposed visualization technique, we conducted a task-oriented user study involving six participants and a case study using 3914 bug reports. The findings from both studies show that our visualization technique is promising, and it can assist the comprehension and analysis of bug reports. The results from the user study indicate that visualized summary is relatively preferred to the non-visualized summary for quick comprehension of bug reports.