# Rediscovery Datasets: Connecting Duplicate Reports

## TL;DR

This paper introduces three large datasets from Bugzilla containing detailed information on approximately 914,000 defect reports over 18 years, focusing on the relationships among duplicate defect reports to aid research and practical defect management.

## Contribution

The paper provides the first large-scale datasets capturing inter-relationships among duplicate defect reports from multiple open source projects, facilitating improved defect analysis and triaging.

## Key findings

- Datasets cover 914,000 defect reports from Apache, Eclipse, and KDE.
- Data spans 18 years, enabling longitudinal studies.
- Sharing datasets supports better understanding of defect rediscovery patterns.

## Abstract

The same defect can be rediscovered by multiple clients, causing unplanned outages and leading to reduced customer satisfaction. In the case of popular open source software, high volume of defects is reported on a regular basis. A large number of these reports are actually duplicates / rediscoveries of each other. Researchers have analyzed the factors related to the content of duplicate defect reports in the past. However, some of the other potentially important factors, such as the inter-relationships among duplicate defect reports, are not readily available in defect tracking systems such as Bugzilla. This information may speed up bug fixing, enable efficient triaging, improve customer profiles, etc. In this paper, we present three defect rediscovery datasets mined from Bugzilla. The datasets capture data for three groups of open source software projects: Apache, Eclipse, and KDE. The datasets contain information about approximately 914 thousands of defect reports over a period of 18 years (1999-2017) to capture the inter-relationships among duplicate defects. We believe that sharing these data with the community will help researchers and practitioners to better understand the nature of defect rediscovery and enhance the analysis of defect reports.