What is the Cause for a Defect to be Re-Assigned?
Tamer Abdou, Behjat Soltanifar, Ayşe Bener, Adam Neal · 2016
Software development organizations often need to balance productivity and sustainability. To keep this balance, attention needs to be given as to why defects are re-assigned. This paper presents an empirical study to explore the causal relationships, other than probabilistic dependencies, between re-assigned/fixed defects and defect attributes: (i) Priority, (ii) Severity, (iii) Density, and (iv) Source. We pursue a quantitative approach based on Bayesian belief networks to uncover the inferential information encoded by these networks. The data source of this research comes from an issue tracking system repository of a proprietary and enterprise level software life-cycle management tool. The causal structure of the defect attributes in our domain has been estimated statistically and the results are plotted. The causes of a defect to be fixed and to be fixed after it has been re-assigned have been explored as well in this study. It has been observed that severity is an effect rather than a cause that significantly affect a defect to be re-assigned in our domain. However, the change of the bug severity has been observed to be a direct cause for a defect to be fixed. We believe that understanding the basis and causes of re-assigning and fixing bugs would help software development organizations to better allocate their resources in the software maintenance phase.