What is the Connection Between Issues, Bugs, and Enhancements? (Lessons Learned from 800+ Software Projects)

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, effective time series model that predicts future bug reports and enhancements in software projects using recent issue report frequencies, aiding project management and resource allocation.

Contribution

It introduces a straightforward forecasting method based on recent issue report counts that requires no historical bug data, making it easy to deploy in various projects.

Findings

Accurately forecasts next month's issues using 4 months of recent data.

Requires only issue report frequency, not detailed bug history.

Applicable to both open source and proprietary projects.

Abstract

Agile teams juggle multiple tasks so professionals are often assigned to multiple projects, especially in service organizations that monitor and maintain a large suite of software for a large user base. If we could predict changes in project conditions changes, then managers could better adjust the staff allocated to those projects.This paper builds such a predictor using data from 832 open source and proprietary applications. Using a time series analysis of the last 4 months of issues, we can forecast how many bug reports and enhancement requests will be generated next month. The forecasts made in this way only require a frequency count of this issue reports (and do not require an historical record of bugs found in the project). That is, this kind of predictive model is very easy to deploy within a project. We hence strongly recommend this method for forecasting future issues, enhancements, and bugs in a project.