Bug Priority Change: An Empirical Study on Apache Projects
23 Pages Posted: 7 Sep 2023
Abstract
In issue tracking systems, each bug is assigned a priority (e.g., Blocker and Minor in JIRA), which indicates the urgency level of the bug. In this sense, bug priority plays an important role in release planning and task assignment of a software project. According to the data extracted from JIRA deployed by Apache, a proportion of bugs in each project underwent priority changes after such bugs were reported, which brings uncertainty to release planning. However, there is a lack of in-depth investigation on the phenomenon of bug priority changes, which impedes the optimization of decision making in release planning. Thus, we conducted a quantitative empirical study on bugs with priority changes in 32 Apache projects. The results show that: 8.3% of the bugs in the projects underwent priority changes; a half of bug priority changes happened before bugs were handled; 87.9% of the bugs with priority changes underwent only one priority change and a higher priority has a greater probability to undergo priority change; bugs that require bug-fixing changes of higher complexity or that have more comments are likely to undergo priority changes; priorities of bugs reported or allocated by a few specific participants are more likely to be modified.
Keywords: Bug Priority Change, Open Source Software, empirical study
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