Bugs and features, do developers treat them differently?
Dongyang Hu, Tao Wang, Junsheng Chang, Yang Zhang, Gang George Yin · 2018
Software development generally produces programs with two caveats, i.e., some codes buggy and certain features incomplete. This make bugs and features two of the most important factors in software development. The inception of issue tracking systems, provides an efficient way to collect valuable feedback from the user community. People can easily report bugs or features by submitting an issue report. However, disparate projects with different goals and needs may converge to different treatments to these two types of issues. Conversely, different treatments may bring different project outcomes. Many studies have explored bugs and features separately, few research has investigated the resolution differences between them from the developers' perspective. In this paper, we present a preliminary study of the resolution differences between the bugs and features in open-source projects by using quantitative methods. We collected and analyzed data from 272 GitHub projects. By building two regression models, we explored how bugs and features differ in discussion length and resolution latency. Furthermore, we performed a qualitative study to compare the difference of description diversity between bugs and features. Our study results show that there are some differences in developers' handling of bugs and features. Finally, we distill some implications for different stakeholders.